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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..."
gksudo "update-manager -c"
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
It's got Firefox 2.0? I wanted IceWeasel!
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Can I now dist-upgrade my Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy?
/etc/apt/sources.list
I think so, I was going to do (on the command line)
sudo sed -e 's/\sdapper/ edgy/g' -i
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
* Go to bed / work *
Which will update my sources list, update the repository and then upgrade. At least, that's what I think it'll do. If anyone has any corrections then let us know.
Summation 2
I say, here's fun! Official word from Mozilla on why Ubuntu shipped with Firefox branded Firefox, rather than Iceweasel.
Plaudits to the Ubuntu guys for getting this release out so quickly. Wonder if I should stick with 6.06 and its LTS or upgrade?
You need to run a second dist-upgrade to update the new usplash. Other than that you should be ok.
The safest thing is not to use a computer :)
Clean install is good if you just play/mess/etc with it, but if you have some nicely configured system you might better want to upgrade it.
There's a bug since 6.06 in the S3 driver that comes from xserver-xorg 7.0v er-xorg-video-s3/+bug/33504
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xser
I hope the patch works this time.
I was kind of disappointed that the Shipit process has changed. According to the site you can only get free Ubuntu CDs of 6.06. If you want 6.10, you will have to pay for them. I guess the gravy train has to run out of gravy eventually. Regardless, I still can't wait for the torrent of 6.10 alt install to finish.
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
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.
It runs kernel 2.6.17, which means it does not yet include the realtime patches by Gleixner and Molnar which find their way into the Linux kernel from kernel 2.6.18 on. To me, this would still mean manually recompiling the kernel, but not for long anymore!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Also the documentation recommends running sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
:P
Thats because if the first command fails you shouldnt run the second for whatever reason.
Ubuntu is the next best thing since sliced bread, and everyone should atleast try it out. I upgraded my 5.10 (no idea how I managed to install that) the other day to 6.06 this way - it went without a hickup. I love ubuntu
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.
A small success story;
The company that I hire my office from has been running redhat for ages, they're getting problems installing their in-house software to the newer versions of redhat because they are using cups instead of the older lp/lpr/lprng systems. Knowing this I started synaptic (the ubuntu package manager), searched for LPRNG with one of the senior guys behind my shoulder. Choosed to install LPRNG, synaptic automaticlly disabled cups and change the appropriate settings. 15 minutes later we were printing useing their sed-scripts from the 80's again.
I think I can safely say that I singlehanded arranged for a bunch of new ubuntu installs with that 20 minutes of my time.
Now that I finished installing 4 Ubuntu systems this week this would happen...
Does anyone have any thoughts about MythTV on Ubuntu vs. other distros?
I'm a relative Linux noob, having only been using it for half a year. I ran Myth 0.19 on Fedora Core 5, but broke it somehow when I upgraded to 0.20. I ran into some sound bug that I couldn't figure out, so I took the easy way out and installed KnoppMyth, which has worked like a charm. However, I'm not in love with Knoppix, so I'm thinking about running trying Myth on Ubuntu.
As a relative noob, I really loved using Yum on FC5, but I haven't had as good of an experience with Apt on Knoppix. In my limited experience, I've had more issues with dependencies using Apt than I did with Yum. I know Ubuntu is also Debian-based and also uses Apt, but I've heard it's very noob-friendly, so I was wondering what merits there would be in switching from KnoppMyth to an Ubuntu-based Myth system.
faster booting thanks to upstart (sort of a replacement for init, among others)
I just had a look at "upstart" and some of its configuration documentation, and while I understand "traditional" rc script processes (such as sysvinit, and the variations on that) I cannot see how upstart will speed anything up. It still seems to be a serialised startup process, and the documentation does not make it clear how to specify startup dependencies ("IP before NTP", or "spamd before sendmail"), so there is no implied optimisation behind-the-scenes by using parallel startup.
Have I missed something, or is this just a move to an event-driven RC process "because I can" ?
Enjoy Y2K? Roll-on Year 2037!
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.
The release schedule has been known for a very long time...
The universe now contains the desktop search with the fastest file-indexer: Strigi! This is a huge improvement over Beagle in terms of resource usage and with the added ability to search for files no matter how deeply nested in packages, archives or mail, it's clearly the best file searching tool for Linux.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
But why develop a whole new mechanism, why not just use launchd?
Clear, Dark Skies
It's also nice, once the iso burned, which is a 2 minute job, to have a CD around.
Wow, I bet all the girls are after you now, you hot stud.
I updated Kubuntu from 6.06 yesterday (as detailed in the RC press release) and after rebooting the system stop working (frozen at the end of the boot process).
Should it happen to you, I did this:
1. reset
2. hit ESC when prompted at boot
3. select safe mode from the menu
4. run "startx" on the commnad prompt. KDE should start.
5. Update the system with Adept (system > package manager).
6. reboot.
Everything is fine now.
Kubuntu 6.10 has also been released. New features + installation/upgrade instructions are here: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/6.10-release.php
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
I just tried updating like that, going from an Ubuntu 6.06 system running GNOME 2.14. But now that I've got GNOME 2.16 installed, I've hit some major performance problems.
The most serious problem is that it now takes 12 to 15 seconds for a new window to open. Even running a GNOME app from an xterm exhibits this problem, so it's not a problem with the GNOME deskbar. Applications like xterm, xedit, and Opera, which do not use GTK+, do not suffer from this problem. They start up almost immediately. Mozilla Seamonkey, on the other hand, also suffers from this long delay, I presume because it is using GTK+.
I need my workstation to actually function, so I have installed KDE, and it's working fine. I think it's significantly more responsive than GNOME 2.14 was. I wish I had time to debug this problem with GNOME 2.16, but I don't. To me, it's just another example of the decreasing quality of the GNOME and GTK+ code. Ever since Miguel left to work on Mono, I've been running into more and more problems. This incident is completely unacceptable, so I think I'm done with GNOME. KDE has really progressed lately, and I think it even now offers me more than GNOME ever did.
I guess the cake sent to them by the Vista team got lost in delivery.
Hey, at least this time we didn't get 8 previous stories "Ubuntu 6.06 releases next week!" "Ubuntu 6.06 releases tomorrow!" "Ubuntu 6.06 releases later todaay!"
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I just installed 6.06 last week, and am quite impressed by it compared to other flavors of Linux I've tried.. Nice philosophy of installing best of breed applications rather than 101 alternatives and the kitchen sink, and it all seems to work.
One thing that spoiled the experience though, was that I initially got a blank screen with the Live CD, so had to go back and do a "safe graphics mode" boot/install. It turns out (no mention of this in the release notes - had to dig for a day to find it) that the X.org ATI driver for 6.06 is broken such that it doesn't work for RV280 based (Radeon 9200) cards using the DVI output (flat panel)... The fix requires downloading and editing the source and rebuilding the driver.
There's also another bug in the 6.06 ATI driver just discovered a week ago where with xorg.conf RenderAccel="yes" it can corrupt drawing in some circumstances (themes that use Cairo).
Does anyone know if either or both of the fixes for these made it into 6.10 ?
If you pay peanuts, you get elephants...you only get monkeys if you're willing to shell out some serious banannas. Rabbits can be had if you're willing to come up with the lettuce and, if you've got the cheese, you'll attract the mice - who will scare away the elephants you only paid peanuts for in the first place.
On the other hand, if I need to get rid of an ass, I'll just tie a carrot to a stick and lead him away.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
It seems to me that init scripts should state what other services they depend on, then some other program sorts out the optimum (and correct) order to start them in.
That's one of the main features of launchd.
Clear, Dark Skies
I ask this seriously: what OSes have you been using that makes you think a clean install is the only "safe" upgrade? I've never done a reinstall-upgrade on a Debian or FreeBSD box, for example. Not once.
Well, you often hear people talking about odd problems after upgrading, on the ubuntu forums for example. A clean install fixes things. It's very hard to pin down the relevant issue in such cases, and they seem rare. But still, I prefer to clean-install Ubuntu (as I will do later today for Edgy).
Does it support WPA without me having to download other packages? (wpa_supplicant, most likely)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I ask this seriously: what OSes have you been using that makes you think a clean install is the only "safe" upgrade?
I believe that if you upgrade Ubuntu from release to release you'll be fine. However, I didn't do that. I upgraded Dapper to Edgy Knot 2. It worked, but over time as the bug fixes came in, it became difficult for X to start. I often had to power cycle 5 or more times before it worked. I even went so far as to enter a bug in Ubuntu's launchpad for it. Well, I did a clean install of the RC and it's all fixed now. My best guess at the problem is a remnant configuration file or something that didn't get appropriately upgraded or removed in the initial Knot 2 dist-upgrade.
So, in other words, for patient people, you should never have to do a clean install. For us impatient freaks, well, I guess we should know what we're getting into.
On a side note, my crappy Celeron 2.4ghz laptop with an even crappier old Intel graphics chip can run the AIGLX and Beryl Window Manager pretty nicely. Cool (possibly excessive) 3d and transparency FX on a computer that Vista's install program laughs at.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
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.
w00t
997 upgraded, 158 newly installed, 26 to remove and 31 not upgraded.
Need to get 659MB of archives.
After unpacking 238MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
looks like it will be a while. has torrent sources been thought about for apt?
Why UNIX?
Its not ready yet. I have summarized my experience here 2 days ago.
Initramfs has been updated several times a day and reports of usb drives double mounting, not mounting, and randomly unmounting are quite huge, many wifi cards no longer work, multiple midi files can crash xmms, firefox 2.0 randomly crashes, and other issues means its not ready yet in my book.
Also in my journal I mentioned gpart crashed during a resizing of my ntfs partition. That was quite scary but I did not lose anything. According to launchpad it has not been fixed yet so Windows users beware.
Ubuntu is my favorite and one of the most stable distro's out there. However I highly advise ubuntu users to wait a few weeks before upgrading to this version.
http://saveie6.com/
I can verify this. I love Ubuntu, but I upgraded my laptop to 6.06 and some things that just worked on a fresh install on a different laptop just act funny on the upgraded machine. Nothing wrong with kpilot on that machine, for example... this one freezes all the time. Katapult acted different on this laptop than the other one, even though I never made any config changes. I think it will eventually be fine to upgrade, but right now when so many of the software packages are so early in their lives, it seems like nothing ever works perfectly after upgrade.
Hey, well, the girls might not be after him, but a million Anonymous Cowards on Slashdot sure are.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
I ask this seriously and also in jest. Why not just have give you the latest and greatest? There has already been discussion of the "best" way to go about upgrading (dist-update, whatever). If instead of having repositories that were "version" specific, why not just have "current" repositories. Then as *everything* progresses, it all gets updated along the way?
Is it just the dependencies issue? Or am I missing something more? Just seems like since Ubuntu is aimed at making it the most user-friendly distro, "version" updates could follow suit.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
No, no it doesn't.
Now scuttle off back to your mom's basement.
My blog
Use the torrents
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The sed utility is an editor that allows you to make changes with in a file without actually opening the file in a more traditional editor like vi, emacs or gedit. What the mystery command does is to read through the file /etc/apt/sources.list and change each instance of dapper to edgy. Essentially it's converting the dapper verion of sources.list to an edgy version so apt-get, aptitude and synaptic will read from the edgy repositories instead of the dapper repos.
So long as your system doesn't have to many oddities installed from outside to Ubuntu repositories, this method should work fine. If you've added a lot of stuff that doesn't appear in the repositories (i.e., compiled from source, convert from RPM via alien), you may end up with a broken system.
I generally do fresh installs after making an image of my current set up and a separate backup of /home. The image is for quick reversion to my original setup if needed. The backup of /home is in case things go horribly, tragically wrong. I use a lot of custom apps that tend to interfer with the dist-upgrade process.
``Why do I have to write one of these, Woops, a hardware regression. posts every time a new Ubuntu version is released?''
Because they release "on schedule", not "when it's done".
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Though I really didn't agree with their lack of respect for the GPL at first, it seems that Automatix is now in the right track. And I must admit that their product is really good and very helpful, both for newbies and veterans installing bunches of 6.(06/10): http://www.getautomatix.com/ Installing java, flash, dvd, mp3 support as well as skype or googleearth is as easy as using synaptic.
Why don't you edit your sources.list to get only the security updates then?
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Umm... what's wrong with "I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS" or "I just installed the latest version of Ubuntu 6.10". They have version numbers so you can discuss this with your boss without having to use phrases like "Dapper Drake", "Edgy Eft" or "Feisty Fawn".
Actually you probably did the right thing, Dapper is the "Long Term Support" version -- basically the 'stable' line, while Edgy is the first of a number of smaller builds that will be released, but do not totally supplant the LTS version.
If the PCs were all your personal machines then of course you can do what you want, but if they're ones that have to work reliably and you're expected to support, you probably saved yourself a lot of trouble by going with Dapper.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And he should comment out "* Go to bed / work *" since the asterisks will expand to every file in the current directory.
I am not a very experienced or proficient Linux user, but I run Ubuntu Dapper and have been doing so since switching (out of curiosity) from OpenSuSE.
The distro is fantastic, save for one thing that I really, really hope will be cured in 6.10. The problem is so huge, so head-slappingly weird and strange, and so bizarrely counter to the usability of the OS that I am forced, when asked whether I would reccommend it to newbies, to say that I would not. The reason is that Ubuntu (and most other Linux distros AFAIK) mounts all external devices as root.
Plug in your Memorystick: read only.
Plug in your FireWire video camera and use Kino: permission denied.
Plug in your USB still camera and use GThumb to import pictures: read only.
Will Ubuntu 6.10 - as the leading and most devastingly cool Linux distro on earth - cure this for me?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Because you use the forums, which are inappropriate for getting information reguarding bugs to developers? Launchpad bug tracking provides a way for INTERESTED people to be AUTOMATICALLY notified whenever a RELEVANT bug is filed. The forums are simply inadequate to connect the various people holding parts of the puzzle, despite the valiant efforts of folk like Sarah Hobbs.
I realize your wifi may have been the only connection with the internet, but has the initramfs shipped with edgy today fixed it, as suggested in the relevant bug report? Development versions are exactly that, and critical fixes can come in until almost the very last minute.
I suppose the other good news is that dapper will be supported for a long time, so you have at least that to work with.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I read on an Ubuntu wiki that Dapper, being their current long-term-support version, does not automatically suggest upgrading to Edgy, which is the 'bleeding edge' version. Presumably Edgy will notify users when Feisty is ready.
I've been plugging memory sticks, external hard drives and my compact flash camera into my PC since Ubuntu 5.something (now on 6.10 and 6.06 on different PCs) and they always magically appear as you'd expect. I'm sure it would be interesting to get to the bottom of whatever is causing problems on your particular installation but I don't think it's the 'normal' experience by any means. A jump to 6.10 may be worth a try but if it's a configuration issue rather than a problem within an actual package upgrading may not fix what's wrong.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It will not. The idea behind Ubuntu's release pattern is "try something new... refine it... get it right... LTS... try something new... refine it..." etc.
Edgy is the "try something new" phase, and as such couldn't be supported as LTS.