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.'"

Comments

Re:VIA C3 Bug

[Stephen Williams]

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

Re:multiarch future?

[Fallingcow]

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.

Re:dapper and edgy

[Reducer2001]

I just tried Dapper this week after using Breezy since it came out. The 'killer app' for me in Linux-land is the addition of the Deskbar Applet in Gnome 2.14. I don't think there is anything in Windows or Mac world that compares to this. I don't know how I got by without it.

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.

Re:dapper and edgy

[JanneM]

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.