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Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released
LarryBoy writes "Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) alpha 4 was released Friday and Ars Technica has a look at what's new in the latest builds of Hardy Heron. 'Although many of the significant architectural features like PulseAudio and GIO are still in transitional stages and aren't fully functional yet, Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 4 is still very impressive. I'm a big fan of D-Bus and I'm very pleased to see it being adopted throughout the entire desktop stack in core components.'"
You mean PolicyKit? Surely granular user privileges are a good thing in this day and age? It's a D-Bus interface anyway, hardly super weird.
Absit Invidia
And Launchpad is part of Ubuntu how, exactly?
More to the point, though Launchpad isn't yet open source, Canonical have made a commitment to open sourcing it. The reasons for it not being done yet are well documented - Shuttleworth himself explained things at length in a blog post some time back. They've already open sourced Storm.
So Launchpad isn't open source, but using that to level an accusation of Ubuntu being closed source is a fairly radical interpretation of the facts.
Yeah, but you're just one guy. If it works for the vast majority, then that *does* cut it. I also object to your comparing pre-installed Vista, with a Ubuntu you set up yourself. Pre-installed Ubuntu is available, and it comes with everything working - I can tell you're shocked. When your only criticism is getting everything working for the first time, you're setting up pre-installed Vista to win the comparison.
To add my experiences with Ubuntu (and being more specific) I had troubles with Ubuntu 6.06 on my T42 ThinkPad trying to use wireless security, although connectivity and WEP worked straight off. Later, Ubuntu 7.10 had a greatly improved NetworkManager. It's everything thing I need. My hat's off to those guys. Even VPN works beautifully through the same interface.
I do hope an open source 11n driver comes out soon. It's really up to which chip vendor wants write one, and it was in this area that I had hopes for the Dell/Ubuntu laptops. If they want to ship 11n, then they'll push someone to support it. You see, your characterization was mistaken. You said:
HP, and Microsoft, fixed the issue with the Broadcom wireless driver
No they didn't. Broadcom fixed it. HP forced them too, and Microsoft did nothing. That's the way it's going to be. Once HP and Dell care, Linux support will be there before the product is shipped.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
This is complete crap - not only is Ubuntu 100% open source, with standard source packages, it is the root of many other distributions and almost encourages people to fork Ubuntu - e.g. Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Linux Mint, Fluxbuntu, and more. They do release their own contributions and actively merge them upstream into Debian, so they are also helping every other Debian-based distro (e.g. Sidux, Knoppix, SimplyMEPIS and many others).
How did this get moderated insightful?