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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.'"
This was on slashdot for a while: Hardy Heron Alpha4: A Glimpse into the Future of Ubuntu; it gives a better look into the new applications included with HH, and mentions some other changes not included in the Ars Technica rewview.
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
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
Please tell me this means that file operations will actually queue to be run in sequence, saving us from disk and cache trashing slowing things down? With "run", "pause", "cancel" on each individual transfer? Pretty please?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
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)
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?
I agree. When picking an OS, you really need to throw your hat into the ring. You've got to get your hands dirty and get your feet wet. I know they say the grass is always greener on the other side, but moving to Vista is just getting out of the frying pan and into the fire. You can't cut off your nose just to spite your face. I'd say just let the chips fall where they may, and don't cry over spilt milk. This topic is really just beating a dead horse; after all, what goes around, comes around.
Needle in a haystack. Quod erat demonstrandum.