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."

Comments

Re:AWW damn!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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)?

X.org 7.2 will (perhaps) be in feisty

[MrvFD]

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.

Re:X.org 7.2 will (perhaps) be in feisty

[lavid]

I'm pretty sure the X.org 7.2 merge is pretty close to complete. It borked a bunch of stuff, beryl, compiz, 3d stuffs, when they only half merged it with the repos last week. From what I see right now all the X.org drivers (except fglrx, ATI's proprietary driver) are at 7.2 as are the xorg server bins. I'm sure there are some modules still to be upgraded especially since Compiz hasn't worked for me since last week. There are plenty of threads about this on http://www.ubuntuforums.org/.

Re:Frozen code?

[Trip Ericson]

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.

Re:Fast going cold on Ubuntu

[Trip Ericson]

Your problems sound more like Gnome problems than Ubuntu problems; I should know, I didn't like Ubuntu on my first shot because I'm partial toward KDE (which I had going on Fedora). I made the switch to Kubuntu and haven't looked back.

It combines the wonderful Ubuntu codebase and DEB packaging system with the KDE interface. I certainly recommend you try it.

Been using it for about a month...

[physicsnick]

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

Re:Why Xorg 7.2 is so important?

[jeevesbond]

There are some details on the release page on the Freedesktop wiki.

From that page:

X11R7.2 supports Linux, BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and GNU Hurd systems. It incorporates significant stability and correctness fixes, including improved autoconfiguration heuristics, enhanced support for GL-based compositing managers such as Compiz and Beryl, and improved support for PCI systems with multiple domains. It also incorporates the new, more extensible XACE security policy framework.

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.

Re:Fast going cold on Ubuntu

[pato101]

Do not need to try Kubuntu instead: you can just install the kubuntu packages in your ubuntu install, by doing just this:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Alternatively, you may play with xfce if you like by adding xfce packages as follows:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Mod Parent Up

[physicsnick]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to version numbers?

[Bazman]

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

Re:AWW damn!!

[MartinG]

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.

Re:how about WoW?

[physicsnick]

Actually, WoW really does work right out of the box with Wine. It has entirely Gold or Platinum status on WineHQ:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=648 2

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. :/

Smoother update process?

[Tarlus]

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.

Re:Smoother update process?

[Quila]

that way you could just use the bittorrent protocol and it would download from the http server if there were no seeders.

Or have a server that's always seeding instead of an http server. Anyone who wants a file to be always available should have this anyway.

Oops, forgot OpenGL

[physicsnick]

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.

Re:Fast going cold on Ubuntu (mail migrate)

[MancunianMaskMan]

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.

Re:I'm using feisty since herd 1

[thegux]

Heh, sorry about that then. Yeah, it's the version number of the kernel. I don't know if you have the 2.6.20-6 version of the kernel installed - you should have it installed if you had Herd 3. To check, run this command:

ls /boot | grep 2.6.20-6

If you have it installed, it should output something like this:

abi-2.6.20-6-powerpc
config-2.6.20-6-powerpc
ini trd.img-2.6.20-6-powerpc
initrd.img-2.6.20-6-powe rpc.bak
System.map-2.6.20-6-powerpc
vmlinux-2.6. 20-6-powerpc

If you don't have it installed, install it with this command:

sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.20-6-powerpc

Once you have this installed, run these commands:

sudo rm /boot/initrd.img.old /boot/vmlinux.old
sudo ln -s /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-6-powerpc /boot/initrd.img.old
sudo ln -s /boot/vmlinux-2.6.20-6-powerpc /boot/vmlinux.old

Be careful with these commands, make sure you follow them exactly, if you don't, you could mess things up pretty badly. Once you've got all this done, this should allow you to boot into the old kernel when you turn on your iBook - y'know when it asks do you want to run from a CD or Linux? You press "l" as usual there - but in the next prompt, you'd usually hit return, right? Well, don't do that. Instead, type "old", and then press return. This'll boot into the old kernel, which has working wireless drivers. (I presume you already have the firmware for those drivers installed, if not, well then install the bcm43xx-fwcutter package. I can't remember if that's in the Ubuntu repos or not - if it isn't then Google around for a .deb). Hope that helps.