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Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Drawing Near
daria42 writes "Ubuntu developers are finalizing preparations for the release of the next version — dubbed Feisty Fawn — of the popular Linux distribution in mid-April. Overnight, Ubuntu developer Tollef Fog Heen announced Ubuntu's main software repository had been frozen — with no changes allowed to the code — as developers got ready to issue a fifth major test version ("Herd 5") of the next version of Ubuntu."
I think you forgot to include the cost of Office 2007 Ultimate? - $679!
You do know that Ubuntu comes standard with OpenOffice and all the other essential applications most Windows users miss out on (unless they pay extra)?
Actually Xorg 7.2 is currently on its way to feisty, thanks to efforts by a community member, working together with Debian and helped by some Ubuntu core developers: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/200 7-February/023252.html
The xserver-xorg-core is already version at 7.2 (or "1.2") now, with the rest of the modules going in gradually. With the modularity of X.org nowadays, it's not certain that all the newest driver work will be in, though. For example the ati driver has seen only some important patches backported to feisty, while there has been a lot of development and reworking without a proper release of xserver-xorg-video-ati lately.
About six months ago I finally decided to switch from my ancient Mandrake 10.2 to Ubuntu 6.10. At the time it seemed like a good choice, and the newer Gnome seemed to be a better option than the older KDE in Mandrake, and Ubuntu solved or avoided a lot of brain damage inherent in Mandrake. I started off as a very happy user.
However as I have been using Ubuntu, I'm finding I like it less and less. Gnome turned out to have a bunch of annoying issues (Mounting a remote FTP server is just a mess, for example). Evolution is nowhere near as good as KMail and contains so many irritating and obvious bugs I'm currently only sticking with it because migrating my five-years worth of email into it was such a pain in the ass I don't fancy going through it again. I attempting to install KMail from Add/Remove Programs at one point but as it simply doesn't work because large parts of KDE are not installed correctly, and anyway it seems dumb to run half of KDE just to use one application. There is nothing comparable to K3b for Gnome in the repositories. Enabling additional repositories isn't as simple as I was led to believe. A lot of the software that is in the repositories seems to be very old versions, and even more of the software there seems to be half-finished or half-baked (Gnomebaker and QDVDAuthor are two recent examples). There are now enough issues that irritate me about Ubuntu as there were with Mandrake before it, so what have I gained? If anything it seems to have been a retrograde step: at least with Mandrake I have KMail and K3b!
I guess my next step will be the try Kubuntu instead, and at least attempt to get back some functional basic applications. Frankly, I relish the thought about as much as I fancy the idea of a root canal.
More useful link:
http://0install.net/
Using since Herd3 here, and it is indeed a big improvement over Edgy. Edgy was, well, edgy for me. On the 64-bit version, many minor things, such as not having the boot splash, or CPU timing sometimes screwed up. Herd4, which was recently released, was quite surprisingly stable, although there remained issues with running 32-bit apps on the 64-bit version. Now, if only they had 1.2.3.1 in Feisty, saving me the need to compile & install it.
It merely means that the code and repos have been frozen in order to allow for anything that's broken to be fixed and made ready for a public, stable release.
Development continues anyway, just that the code for this release has been frozen except for bug fixes.
At least, that's my understanding of it.
Ubuntu is a package of applications based on the Linux kernel. All this freeze means is that the team in charge of Ubuntu has decided exactly what will be in the next release, and would like to fix any remaining bugs instead of spending the remainder of their time adding things. Once Fawn is released, new versions of software, and different software, will be added to the repositories, but they are optional to install, this article only speaks of the ultimate decision for what is default in the next release.
I've been beta-testing Kubuntu Feisty for about a month now, and it's amazing. It's already a huge improvement over Edgy. Everything is so intuitive and easy to use; Feisty is going to kick ass.
Some of the new stuff they've added are a new wireless network manager by default, big improvements to the package installation system, easy codec/flash installation, lots of user interface tweaks... It looks so polished now, I love it.
Here are the Herd release announcements, containing a subset of the changes Feisty brings:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd1/Kubuntu
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd2/Kubuntu
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd3/Kubuntu
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd4/Kubuntu
Why don't you go read the X11R7.2 changelog?
The inclusion of XCB is one of the major changes. It replaces the fuctionality of Xlib, but offers an Xlib compatibility layer. XCB is the way of the future, my good man.
There have been some major code cleanups. There is Intel i965 chipset support. There are numerous workarounds to support the shitpile that is Fedora Core. The built-in keyboard driver has been removed.
There are some details on the release page on the Freedesktop wiki.
From that page:
Release notes should be on the download page, they're marked 'forthcoming' at the moment, but wait a day or two and they should appear.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
GP, simply hop into a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get autoremove
No need to reinstall anything; it's that easy to switch. If you liked KDE in Mandrake, you'll surely like KDE in Kubuntu.
Some of the other distros do get a bit odd, but the Ubuntu releases are in alphabetical order...
Dapper
Edgy
Feisty
Just as good as numbers, as long you remember the alphabet song.
Ubuntu version names are (now) alphabetical, so Dapper Drake preceded Edgy Eft, which precedes Feisty Fawn. The names are always Adjective Animal ('eft' is another name for a newt).
There are also version numbers, so that Edgy Eft is 6.10 (meaning year 2006, month 10). The releases are supposed to be every six months in April and October.
Barry
No.
What is illegal is abusing monopoly power in one area to force your way into another.
So bundling MS office with Windows would be illegal because they own and control both and are a monopoly. Ubuntu is nowhere near a monopoly.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
It won't.
The one after it might be. I've heard the release cycle as of Dapper was meant to be first an LTS release, then a release with radical new changes (ala Upstart), then a polished release-of-awesome, then back to LTS again. That's probably just speculation; take it with a large grain of salt.
Actually, WoW really does work right out of the box with Wine. It has entirely Gold or Platinum status on WineHQ:8 2
:/
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=64
On that page there's a hugely overcomplicated guide on getting it working; Feisty will tremendously simplify things, especially since it comes with Wine 0.9.30. Here's how you'd install WoW in Feisty:
1) Install your video card drivers. This involves clicking Applications->Add Applications, clicking Advanced, and choosing nvidia-glx for NVidia cards or xorg-driver-fglrx for ATI. Much simpler than on Windows.
2) Restart X (press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE).
3) Put the WoW install CD in the drive.
4) Browse to your CD-rom (/media/cdrom) and double-click Installer.exe
5) Do the Next-Next-Finish dance
6) Double click the icon on your desktop to launch the game.
So it's pretty much identical to Windows, except the CD won't autorun.
Its been a while since I used windows, but I don't think MS Office was ever bundled with windows. There used to be a trial version of Word and Powerpoint but MS Office was always a separate product.
While it is true that Microsoft use their monopoly to push windows onto many unsuspecting users, I'm not sure they really bundle any software with windows that stifles competition (perhaps their new AV software is..but I don't really sympathize with their competitors on that one!)
I hope the upgrade-via-apt-get process goes much more smoothly this time... I had a lot of troubles going to 6.10 last fall using this method, and I noticed a number of other people did, too. I ended up having to just download the ISO and install fresh because I messed up my existing installation beyond repair just by trying to update... Either way, it was worth it, since I love the improvements that Edgy introduced. It is by far the slickest distro I've used.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you upgrade to Feisty Fawn by just updating your list of apt repositories, do NOT do a dist-upgrade to their apt servers on release day since thousands of other people will be doing it at the same time. The load will slow it down just about to the point of timing out (at least in my experience). If you want to upgrade to it on release day, I'd recommend using bittorrent to get the ISO (faster this way) and then doing an apt-get dist-upgrade with that CD-ROM as a new apt repository.
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You also need to tell Wine to use OpenGL by adding a couple lines config file. It's step 4 in the appdb link I posted. So one additional step.
Probably feeding a troll here, but "Feisty Fawn" is the code name for the project that is officially called "Ubuntu 7.04". Just like Windows Vista was dubbed "Longhorn" for the longest time. Read up a little before posting crap.
And which parallel universe did you crawl out of?
Upstart is similar in concept to Launchd, but was written from scratch by Ubuntu. It is event-driven, not runlevel driven, which gives it some very interesting abilities that I'm sure will be exploited in creative ways in the future. I would be surprised if we don't see it included in Suse and Fedora in the near future, and a package is already in Debian experimental.
For more on Upstart, check out its website: http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
The original Ubuntu feature request that lead to it is here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit (Discussions at the bottom as to why Launchd was not used.)
http://www.mhall119.com
I think it was setting IE as the default browser that caused the Monopoly problem,not Office
America, Home of the Brave.
Back in the mists of time, Qt wasn't licensed under a free software license. Therefore, the GNOME project was started as a way to create a desktop environment that would be GPL/LGPL compatible. Rather than merely clone Qt as free software, the developers opted to start again from scratch.
.NET technologies.
Then TrollTech made Qt available under the GPL. Unfortunately, GNOME continued; by that point, there were too many egos involved, and too many wheels had been reinvented. These days GNOME is mostly there (a) as an ego trip, and (b) because it's more compatible with cheapskate proprietary software developers.
The latter needs some further explanation. Basically, GNOME and GTK+ are LGPL licensed, not GPL licensed, so you can develop proprietary closed-source software for GNOME for free. In contrast, you have to pay money to develop proprietary closed-source KDE software, because you need to negotiate a non-GPL license for Qt with TrollTech. GNOME also includes Mono as part of the core GNOME desktop, so you can use the patented proprietary Microsoft
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
migrate your mail: I installed my own IMAP server (courier-imap, use Maildir-format to store mail in individual users' $HOME, configure system-wide fetchmail to deliver email to users). That way you can change tour mail client on a daily basis, since they all support IMAP, and your mail stays in the same place. As an added bonus you can use email on other computers in your house if you have a laptop with WiFi ot something like that. Once you've set your IMAP up, you can darag-and-drop historic email from your "old" evolution email into IMAP, close evolution for good, and run Kmail, thunderbird, mutt, ot whatever else you like.
no, it was setting IE as default and then preventing OEMs from making Netscape default under threat of losing their right to distribute Windows.
Merely including a product for free is not illegal.
Advanced users are users too!
On the one hand, you will not need to run GNOME (Metacity) or KDE (kwin) in order to get fancy eyecandy. On the other hand, nor will you be running fluxbox any longer if you want the capabilities of Beryl and Compiz. If you want Beryl or Compiz, then you use either Beryl or Compiz. They are, indeed, window managers themselves (just with compositing capabilities). So, unfortunately, you may either stick with the simple beauty of flux, or go with the powerful beauty of Beryl/Compiz. But there is no good combination for you, currently.
Don't you worry, Etch will be out soon enough. The number of release-critical bugs is now going down nicely and the final version of the installer, RC2, will probably be announced during this week. But you don't have to wait for the Etch release. You can download and install Etch right now. It has been ready for normal use for several months now.
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/The Etch release process has also significantly decreased the number of release-critical bugs in Sid -- and Ubuntu has updated their sources from the Debian pool several times during the Feisty release cycle. This means that Feisty will be more solid than several earlier Ubuntu releases, while Feisty+1 will again be a hayride to Hell for Ubuntu when Debian Sid goes bonkers after the Etch release. :-P