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Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released

Posted by Zonk on from the that-bird-can-take-a-beating dept.

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.'"

15 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. ndiswrapper by Finallyjoined!!! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Still doesn't work properly.
    But 8.04, it's bloody nice! I downloaded it this afternoon for a play :-) Ooops, p2p, must be illegal. Its great man!

    --
    If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
    1. Re:ndiswrapper by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm very put off by the selective-sudo nonsense that's supposedly going to be pervasive in Hardy. That can't possibly be supported by the processor without some super-weird extra abstraction that will just slow things down.

    2. Re:ndiswrapper by cheater512 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There must be very very few things that you need ndiswrapper for these days.

      To be honest, I've never needed to touch it at all.
      I've been pretty lucky with wifi support (every wifi device I've bought has Linux drivers even though I didnt check before hand) but other hardware also works fine.

      I consider ndiswrapper a really dirty hack which is required in certain circumstances.
      I would never tell anyone to use it.

    3. Re:ndiswrapper by cheater512 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have never used Ubuntu so please correct me if I'm wrong.

      Is the wifi problem in Ubuntu driver related or UI related?

      Its a well known fact that wifi manufacturers really hate giving away any clues so making wifi drivers is always a struggle.
      A *lot* of them are currently supported though and more are on the way.

      If its UI related then there arent too many excuses.
      However its probably best if they did it right the first time so if they need more time, I say give it to them.

    4. Re:ndiswrapper by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The funny thing is I rarely find setting up wireless networking in Windows a trouble-free experience. I'm not saying I've never had problems with Ubuntu, far from it, but I've had far more problems with Windows XP.

    5. Re: ndiswrapper by Dolda2000 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I may well agree that the effects of PolicyKit are a good thing, but I have to say that I am not immediately convinced of its D-Bus implementation. D-Bus may be fun and all, but I'm getting the feeling that Linux distributions are increasingly turning into D-Bus distributions. IIRC, Red Hat has even announced a project for a D-Bus based init replacement. I liked D-Bus when it was all about the desktop, and getting the occasional system level abstraction like HAL, BlueZ or possibly NetworkManager to speak to desktop programs, but now I feel it is beginning to replace core POSIX policies.

      Not that a D-Bus operating system couldn't possibly be good, but all I really want, quite honestly, is a good Unix system. More D-Bus at the system level is, for me, rather an argument to switch my laptop over to Debian instead, and then if Debian becomes GNU/DBus as well, I guess I'll switch to FreeBSD instead.

    6. Re: ndiswrapper by jd · · Score: 5, Interesting
      POSIX simply doesn't support all the facilities required for a trusted (as in "Trusted IRIX") Operating System and, let's face it, security has for a long time been moving more towards MAC and not just for Linux. POSIX got into updating security surprisingly late in the game, and although there are patches for POSIX ACLs for Linux, I can't think of a single distro or mega-patch that includes POSIX security. I seem to recall Linux is deprecating some POSIX functionality, like POSIX ttys, and the kernel has always included unPOSIX-ish code where it is clear that the official POSIX syntax or semantics are carp (sic) or where support for other standards has been useful or expedient.

      D-Bus may not be the answer to everything, individual technologies rarely are, and it's not as if D-Bus was even the only user-level software bus commonly used in Linux, but it has interesting potential. Not sure how well it currently plays with clustering technology like MOSIX, or grid technology, but given the effort being poured into developing user-space software buses precisely for those, I imagine that's just a matter of time.

      Personally, I'd rather have more localized limited-purpose buses in any case where a general-purpose solution is slower and/or heavier. The code can't be that maintenance-intensive and too much abstraction must eventually pessimize the resulting code. Moore's Law is worthless if code gets slower at the same rate systems get faster. Nonetheless, any general-purpose abstract IPC that is easier to implement against than traditional mechanisms (RPC, CORBA, Unix sockets, System V messages, etc) must surely be beneficial - even if those end up being the mechanisms used under the hood. In fact, the more of those implemented and the better you could switch data between them, the more portable such a software bus becomes as well as the more optimal - to a point. The whole trend in programming is towards such pluggable solutions, it's surprising IPC is so far behind almost every other mechanism out there, and unless there are specific technological reasons to not use a given generic mechanisms (such as performance costs), you're already using so many that are not following some standard or other that it's absurd to discriminate against one just because it's not specifically POSIX.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  2. Yet to be impressed by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am yet to be impressed because I cannot copy an Internet URL, paste it in a native GNOME application and have the application in question open the link. If the link points to a PDF document, some error is returned, even with the default PDF application installed. The only way out of this misery is to save the document onto the hard-disk. This is an non-starter GNOME folks, something MUST be done.

  3. Re:PulseAudio works nicely in Fedora 8 by cbart387 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Business sense most like. It doesn't really matter where it originated as long as Ubuntu does it well. If they put emphasis that PulseAudio was originally developed for Fedora wouldn't that make it more likely that people would try out Fedora instead of Ubuntu. I'm sure more knowledgeable slashdotters could name packages for Fedora that were originally developed in Ubuntu or other distros. It's all a matter of perception but perception is important.

    --
    Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
  4. Congratulations! by BeeBeard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Big congratulations goes to the Ubuntu team for sticking to their release schedules, and getting their fairly solid alphas and betas out there for users to bang on well in advance. Like many others, I thought that Ubuntu Linux was just another flavor-of-the-month distribution, but the tenacity, reliability, and graciousness of the Ubuntu community has proved us all wrong.

    -A Longtime Gentoo User

    1. Re:Congratulations! by ajayrockrock · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, I'm a longtime gentoo user too and have recently switched my desktop (home) and workstation (office) to Ubuntu.

      It's not to say that Ubuntu is better then Gentoo or anything else. It's just that I think my day to day goals have changed. Where as before I had more time to tinker and play, Gentoo was so much fun. But now I've switched jobs and life is getting in the way, I need to get "work" done and pass on the tinkering.

      After switching to Ubuntu, it's nice to just have little things "work". Not like a Mac, but better then Gentoo. Opening attachments in thunderbird prompt the *right* app. yes, I know I can fix it by opening up some files and preferences but it's all done without me having to mess with it.

      Ubuntu allows me to get work done on linux, Gentoo forced me to work on linux.

      --Ajay

  5. What about KDE integration? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I love the integration and simplicity of the gnome interface on Ubuntu and have turned into a gnome user over the years when I run Linux.

    However with the fiasco with Suse, Micorosoft, patents, .NET, and Miguel supporting ooxml over ODF I am begining to feel uncomfortable running Gnome and wonder about ulterior motives. Doesn't Miguel work for SuSE? Didn't SuSE just cripple their own Samba version in order to sell more copies of Windows as an AD controller?

    Kde 4.0 supposed to be a rapid improvement and Kubuntu is supposed to be alot more polished and integrated as Ubuntu according to comnpany officials as planned by Hardy. I wonder if this is going to be the case?

    I want a choice of Gnome but still have everything just work well. I found KDE in ubuntu to be not integrated and rather a poor implementation compared to the polished version of Gnome.

    Also Dbus is not friendly on laptops as the event model prevents many models from going to a power saving mode wasting battery power. I wonder if this has been resolved.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  6. Re:PulseAudio works nicely in Fedora 8 by krmt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Then why doesn't the Ubuntu community set themselves up on a totally free infrastructure? Every other major distro has one these days.

    --

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."

  7. Re:Getting tired of Ubuntu by domatic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    2K and XP don't implement all singing all dancing 3D desktops. Compiz and Vista do. As the parent post said, all is well if the uber 3D desktop is avoided. It appears that the 3D drivers aren't good enough anywhere that running everything through them is a good move. I've tried out Compiz a few times myself. Each time I've thought, "Wow! that looks cool!" and then went back to stuff that didn't blow up everytime I turned around.

  8. Yay, another sound daemon... by multi+io · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...and while nobody is going to use its native interface, maybe we can use it to get rid of the Alsa Mess[tm] by burying it under a hopefully less messy stack of 5 userspace modules that may introduce 2 seconds of latency, but provide an emulated /dev/dsp on top! Sure, you have to run the OSS-using app under an obscure wrapper named "padsp", which probably means you'll have to run the whole X session under padsp and hope it doesn't crash too often, but oh well... :-P