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Looking Forward, Ubuntu Linux 6.06
SilentBob4 writes to tell us that Mad Penguin has an interesting look at the upcoming version of Ubuntu. From the article: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry. As I said before, it smoked Fedora Core 5 performance-wise, so in that department it's solidly ahead."
Sure, you said it - but where are the benchmarks?
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I am a developer on the Linux platform and have been using linux since 1999. About a week ago, I was ready to install a linux distro since my old HD bit the dust (on my new custom-built Asus SLI AMD64 box). After hearing all the press about Ubuntu, I burned a copy and tried it. I found the install slightly painful.
/etc/hosts file to include my hostname. After doing this, gnome allowed me to configure my network. (Why can't the installer do this?)
Installation:
On my first install, I tried partitioning a 300 GB Fat32 partition at the end of the drive for sharing cross-OS stuff (mp3s, etc. I'd tried a windows Ext2 driver previously, but it eventually corrupted the partition and I lost all my recent mp3s) and 2 GB swap and the rest for the OS. Ubuntu absolutely failed to format the one partition Fat32, gave me an error and choked. OK. How tbout ext2? Well, that choked too. Not caring about that partition, I decided to just bypass the step manually and have it copy the OS. I can always format the partition manually. It choked setting up apt (for reasons I don't understand). I decided that, despite manually partitioning every linux distro I've ever used, I'd let ubuntu choose for me. This seemed to "work".
Configuration:
The first thing any computer user wants to do is get on the internet. I've got a static IP where I live so I decided to set up the networking. Unfortunately, without a working hostname, there's literally no way to do this. On bootup, gnome suggested I manually edit my
On the positive side all of my devices (audio/video) were configured correctly but on the downside, there doesn't seem to be any good way of upgrading packages (Firefox to 1.5 or my NVidia drivers) when the current version isn't in the repository (I'm probably missing something).
I'm hoping with the new release, Ubuntu can fix some of these usability issues while keeping their slick package management.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
"OS X's skin reminds me of Fisher Prices "My First Computer"'
Whoa, you just mad a fool of yourself on so many different levels all at once! WTG!
amaroK isn't that bad, but both desktops do need someone other than former/current Windows 98 programmers to bring both Linux desktops up to year 2006 standards. The only people who can stomach the current Linux desktops are people who ditched Windows back in 1999-2000 or so. The 'make it look and act like Win98 but with more features' 'strategy' for the Linux desktops was a silly design goal five years ago. It is an embarrassment in 2006.
Hopefully a large commercial company will pick up the slack and start funding competent UI engineers/artists and fix the mess that is the Linux desktop soon.
As a longtime BSD person, I find it kind of odd that it is even sensible to talk about the relative stablity of Linux distributions. It is just silly to talk about stability in the BSD world. For all intents and purposes the BSDs just don't crash unless the hardware is flakey or incompatable. It is pretty hard to say one is more stable than the other without an incident to use as data =). Years ago, I used Debian, and I don't recall any stability issues there either. Have things changed?
A question for keen Linux users 'in the know':
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
I'm eager to try out the new Ubuntu when it comes out. Will we be able to upgrade to 6, or will we need to do a complete reinstall? I used to have FC4 x86_64 on my system, and have since then put Ubuntu on it. I think I like Ubuntu more. I was dissapointed/annoyed that so much of the stuff built into FC were missing in Ubuntu, but I've pretty much added back everything I wanted (using synaptic, which is best package manager I've played with yet). The big thing I was missing was the stuff to compile stuff by hand, but it looks like after RTFA, that will be easy to fix (apt-get install build-essentials). I also wish the Ubuntu repository was a little more up to date, because I've had to install some stuff by hand. But the big pros have been the great package manager. Wine, Firefox, and whatnot work good in my chroot, better than I got them to work in FC4. X was leaking memory on my system in FC4, but with Ubuntu it doesn't. Overall, I liked both alot, but I think I like Ubuntu a little bit better.
I'm not a programmer. I don't develop software, and I don't really write code.
I _am_ a programmer. I _do_ develop software, and I write code all the time. And I love Ubuntu, for precisely the reason the OP seems to dislike it. If it's simple for the beginner, it mostly means it's simple for the experienced user as well.
I'm not interesting in using a desktop. My interest is in doing my job or pursuing my hobbies, and a desktop should just get out of the way and make it as easy and transparent as possible for me to do so. And of course, whenever I need a shell, it's still right there for me to use (and while I do use the shell a lot, it's still less than it used to be).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room.
;o)
Full release or not, there's never a call for giving MS a breathing space when they're releasing a product.
Would you mind writing a couple of sentances then? I've not noticed much difference :-/ Also some backing up of your statements generally would be a good idea -- a lot of moaning "it sucks!" with no specifics or suggestions make you look like just another troll
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system.
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
That having been said, I'm running Dapper as of yesterday, and I had to do crazy tricks to get it to actually print to my standard, detected printer.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
I bought an emachine specifically for Ubuntu to play around with and get to know the OS. I couldn't get the Breezy 5.10 or the 6.X beta to recognize the onboard NIC, video or onboard audio. I want to get to know the OS. I don't want to have to know how to install or create a driver at this point. Maybe after I get my feet wet with the OS. I returned the emachine and put Ubuntu on the back burner. From what I was told, there just aren't any drivers written for alot of onboard components yet. =(
Read more: http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS7069459557.html
Has Linux *really* reached a point where stability is an issue, or is this a red herring misleading those that don't use it? If indeed it does have stability issues, how often does it crash? What are the chances of losing a filesystem?
Stability is only an issue at the desktop level (Gnome, KDE, OOffice, Firefox and so on), and xBSD are running the same stuff as Linux at that level, and they're overall equally crash-prone no matter what platform.
On the kernel level, I haven't seen a crash for years - and that was when I was fiddling with a device driver, making it my own fault. I know the closed-source Nvidia drivers can apparently take down a machine, but then again, you'd have the same situation on BSD if you have the drivers.
On the file system level, the standard file systems seem very, very stable. I have never heard of disk corruption that wasn't hardware related. The more experimental stuff, like ReiserFS, seem anecdotally less stable; but then, they aren't used by default either. As usual, if you want to live on the bleeding edge, expect to cut yourself from time to time.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You're missing the friggin' point.
Ubuntu *is* a Gnome distro.
This is a problem. Gnome is ugly in our eyes.
Your problem, not mine. If you don't want Gnome, don't use ubuntu. It's that simple.
because I as a user do not want it.
But there are plenty out there who do. Your personal opinion is not going to decide if Gnome is successful on the desktop or not.
And I cannot stand the Gnome imperialism.
And I cannot stand the KDE imperialism.
There are two types of people in the world: 1) those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.
Fedora has high standards for stability and functionality.
So did the Titanic.I still remember when they said they would take the best elements from Fedora and put them into the next RHEL. I left the RedHat family after they dropped support for RH9, and now they want me to be a beta tester for RHEL? Thanks, but no. I'll stick with a distro that I use, not one that uses me (what is this, Soviet Russia?).
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!