Ubuntu 6.10 is Out

cloudmaster writes "Apparently they were watching me to see when I downloaded the 6.10-rc release isos, as I did that last night, and the full release happened this morning. :) Neat stuff, including Firefox 2.0, Gnome 2.16, myth 0.20, faster booting thanks to upstart (sort of a replacement for init, among others), etc. The announcement and download pages are up. I've got *my* torrent running..."

Comments

Debian?

[Klaidas]

Why is there a Debian icon here? Yeah, I know, "ubuntu is based on debian", etc. But if the distro is THAT popular, you might wanna get an icon for Ubuntu too.

Re:Debian?

[SexyJesus]

I agree. Ubuntu has been the most popular distribution on distrowatch for more than a year now.

Some early impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrade from Dapper via the net too around 1 hour (DSL) and went very smooth. During the updating process the system worked fine, but some strange things started to happen due to new versions of apps and libraries slowly filtering in (e.g. funny fonts, missing icons).

After the reboot ...

Dapper was already a fast system, Edgy feels even faster. In particular, bott time is shorter, the Gnome menus come up quicker. The Murrine GTK+ theme I had installed from outside of the normal repositories was broken. Fonts were not fully hinted (looked smeared) in Firefox and gnome-terminal; this was fixed by explicitly switching to full hinting in the fonts preferences. These have been the only regressions I've noticed so far.

The new Firefox 2 is certainly nice, e.g. spell-checking in text fields, not slow as molasses anymore on framed pages, etc. Departs further from GTK look & feel with the (literally) shiny new tabs. Epiphany has acquired adblocking capabilities, but is still not installed by default.

Re:apt-get dist-upgrade

[johansalk]

It's also nice, once the iso burned, which is a 2 minute job, to have a CD around.

Still no 3D desktop?

[cciRRus]

Mandriva 2007 and Fedora Core 6 now come out-of-the-box with 3D desktop support (XGL/AIGLX + Compiz). The 3D desktop not only serve as a great piece of eyecandy, it (e.g. cube desktop and Expose clone) also makes the GUI friendlier and more efficient. As a Ubuntu user, I'm a little disappointed that Ubuntu 6.10 does not provide 3D desktop support.

Re:Upstart faster how?...

[diegocgteleline.es]

"It still seems to be a serialised startup process"

It is. For Ubuntu edgy, a "compatibility layer" has been implemented to allow upstart run the old sysv /etc/init.d scripts

This is because changing everything in a single release was too much. For the next release, they'll replace the old scripts with true upstart scripts and then the switch will be complete (and still there'll be compatibility for the unported sysv scripts available in extra packages)

Re:Can I

[drinkypoo]

looks like it will be a while. has torrent sources been thought about for apt?

Apt just barely has concurrent downloads and you're worried about torrent sources?

In order to really make use of torrent, apt would have to be much more asynchronous. It should determine an overall order for packages, create multiple install jobs based on dependencies (so if you're installing two things and each one has five different dependencies, then apt should be allowed to install one while the other is downloading) and so on. Apt does none of these things so a torrent would be a waste. However, it might be reasonable to make major release upgrades through an automated process of torrenting an ISO, mounting it, and doing the update.

Probably not, though.