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Previewing Dapper And Edgy
Frank Clarkson writes to mention a ZDNet article about the upcoming release of 'Dapper Drake', Ubuntu Linux. They also give a mini-preview of Eft. From the article: "'I'm promising to impose (almost ;-) ) zero from-the-top requirements for Edgy, this release is entirely up the to development team to envision and implement,' he wrote. 'Almost everything that lands in Edgy will be driven from the development team, who get to play with whatever new technologies they fancy along the way. So that should give us a nice big bump in infrastructure and bling.'"
The older C3s are Pentium Pro mostly-compatible, but are missing the cmov instruction. Most stuff compiled for the Pentium Pro or better processors assumes that the CPU supports that instruction.
AFAIK, the Ubuntu guys follow the same philosophy as the Debian project in that they don't optimize binaries for specific processors, except for the kernel. If you were to try a kernel built for i386, i486 or Pentium on that C3 box, it might well work.
(If you roll your own kernels, there's an option to build a kernel specially for the C3. That's what I do on my own C3 box (running Debian)).
-Stephen
Personally, I'm very glad they got network-manager in there. Right after feature freeze was when NM was updated to the point where it supported WPA to the point where it was acceptable for Dapper. We had to beg and plead to get NM in after FF, but they finally caved in due to some hard work by some people.
For the past ~2 months, with NM, I've had the most enjoyable (Computer related:)) docking/undocking ever. It's so nice to be able to undock and walk out to the balcony and soak up some sun & computer without running any special scripts. Here's to your XGL.
IIRC, this means that Firefox (or your browser of choice) and, more significantly, any multimedia programs that need to do WMV decoding will have to be compiled for 32-bit mode.
This removes much of the incentive for using 64 bit on the desktop, as the biggest speedup will be seen in multimedia apps.
It's still better than nothing, of course.
Imagine this: Microsoft takes a page the HP of old and lets the developers drive for a while.
You know, I rail against Microsoft as hard as anyone. But my beef is not with the developers, it's with the marketing staff and corporate officers who run the company like a pissing contest - and they're pissing on all of us.
Imagine if Outlook played nice with IMAP, and didn't capriciously embed attachments in winmail.dat files which only work in Outlook. Imagine if Outlook/Exchange used the standard RFC headers for message threading, instead of intentionally breaking compatibility with other clients. Imagine if Microsoft stovepiped their applications, so that you could choose individual products on their merits, instead of compelling you to swallow the whole enchilada if you want any of it. Imagine if Microsoft committed themselves to being 100% compliant with the RFC's, IETF, IEEE and ISO standards they purport to implement. Imagine if Microsoft committed to opening their document formats and network protocols, and decided to compete purely on the merits of their software.
That would be nice, wouldn't it? But thanks to Marketing Directors and Wall Street, it will never happen. And this thread's OP wants more of that?! Puleeeaze. The US needs to re-examine its values in a big way. We're failing to compete in the global market. We offend our friends. We make new mortal enemies. We insist on tithing all our money to a very few mega-rich people. And we can't figure out why it's so hard to pay the bills. And yes, it's all connected. We've created a culture of pyramid scheme worship, we've done our best to export it worldwide, and it's unsustainable.
Note to Microsoft: Fire the damn Marketing Directors. Fire the damn B School flunkies. Do real work that matters to people. What a nice change that would be.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about check this out.
Finally, some innovation on the Linux desktop, instead of "Me too!" apps.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
The current Dapper beta has beautiful support for Scim-chinese/pinyin. Of course, Firefox is stuck in the stone ages with libc5 and so won't work with it, but if you type in OOo or (I'd imagine) any other competent editor, it works perfectly.
Are you quite sure? I run Breezy with Scim for Japanese, and I can use it in the default Firefox with no trouble; never had to do anything, it just worked. If anything OOo is the most troublesome, since you need to set a bunch of options regarding preferred fonts and such that do not have good defaults.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
So we'll determine the next version of Ubuntu that practically everyone uses by what the developers want.
Technically, the "next version" of Ubuntu will be the Dapper Drake release, not Edgy Eft. That said, Dapper is billed as the solid, long term support release, which everyone can feel comfortable with while the devs mess around with Edgy Eft. This is important because it allows users to not have to upgrade if they need stability and don't need/want the bleeding edge.
Since Dapper is supposed to be so stable, Edgy will allow the devs to go nuts and see what they can do, perhaps advancing things by leaps and bounds, perhaps falling flat. If they do fall flat, users can stay with (or go back to) Dapper and still recieve support/updates etc.
How about an experiment where the users determine the features of the leading desktop Linux distro?
You can submit feature requests through various channels. Whether it gets put on as a spec depends on request, the current state of development in other areas, etc. The Ubuntu devs try very hard. It's not as easy as you might think. Users have so many different needs and expecting one distro to be all things to all people is a mistake in itself. In addition, it will probably never come with everything under the sun because they would like to keep the install disc a single cd, not 5 cd's, or a dvd.
HTH