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Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Released
markybob writes "Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 beta has been released. It features GNOME 2.22 and uses Linux kernel 2.6.24. Furthermore, it uses Firefox 3 beta 4, and PulseAudio is enabled by default. To ease the transition of Windows users, it includes Wubi, which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation."
I think it's new enough that there isn't a lot of first-hand experience with it. The FAQ describes it in Alpha, although the download link refers to it as Beta... in any case, my suspicion is that it is likely not very stable yet. You may want to experiment with it on a home PC before putting it on your work laptop.
Take a look at http://wubi-installer.org/ and see for your self. Essentially it uses a large file on your windows OS as the file system. When you install it, it modifies your bootloader to give you the option of booting to that machine.
If you decide you don't like it, just reboot into Windows and uninstall it via add/remove programs.
Performance is slightly slower due to the extra hoops your *nix OS has to jump through, but you won't notice if you're running on modern hardware. I liken it to being able to boot to a VMWare image.
Still free, but one version is not supported. Because of the current transition to KDE 4, the KDE 3.5 Kubuntu is the officially supported distro, while the KDE 4 distro is community maintained.
'with limited functionality'
Where did you read that? If you look at the official page https://wiki.kubuntu.org/HardyHeron/Beta/Kubuntu you'll see that the difference is the commercial support available. Since KDE 4 is not intended to be used by the general public just yet, there will be one version of Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE 3.5 that is supported, and one with 4.0 that isn't.
Slagborr
Rock solid KDE 3
Commercial support provided by [WWW] Canonical for a term of 18 months
Release available through ShipIt for everybody as well as downloading
Kubuntu KDE 4 Remix
Cutting edge KDE 4.0
Support provided by the Kubuntu community via [WWW] Ubuntu Forums, [WWW] Kubuntu Forums, IRC, and the [WWW] Kubuntu Users Mailing List.
Release available through CDs for groups who need it (ie. LoCo teams, conference teams, etc.) as well as downloading
As I understand it, there will be 2 versions Kubuntu 8.04 and Kubuntu KDE 4 Remix 8.04. The vanilla version has the standard support lifetime with updates and you can purchase support from Canonical, basically the way it has always been. The Remix version includes KDE 4 and is a bit less stable. Therefore, the Remix version does not offer official support and you need to go to the forums. I am not sure what the security or bug update procedure is, that is, whether or not packages found only in Remix will receive security and bug updates. So the "commercially" supported version is the same Kubuntu as usual, but Remix is for all of those people screaming about KDE 4.
The "relatime" mount option tells the filesystem to update atime only when it is older than mtime or ctime. This is better than turning off atime entirely, but doesn't have the performance issues of the older atime functionality.
I think you're confused. Canonical splitting any of their official distros into a limited free version and a fully-functional paid version would violate their own promise that Ubuntu will always be free of charge. Even if they wiggled out of that on a technicality, Ubuntu lives purely on the strength of its community. Canonical know that and would be insane to risk losing them through such a move.
The actual situation is that Kubuntu will be splitting into two versions, both of them free in all senses of the word, for the 8.04 release. One (using KDE 3.5.9) will be officially supported for 18 months (it won't be a Long Term Support release, since KDE 3 likely won't be supported in three years, though it will still support upgrading directly from 6.06) while the other (using KDE 4.0.2) will be community supported. This is probably because (like me) they think that KDE 4 really isn't ready yet as it hasn't had much time to mature and many of the Extragear application (some of which come with Kubuntu) haven't been updated yet, the most notable for me being Amarok.
My understanding is that Kubuntu will only do this split release system for the 8.04 release, with the 8.10 release likely to use KDE 4.0.x officially.
I am using the Ubuntu beta since the early Alpha versions and I should admit that everything is going into place very well. Actually using it, you'd never say it's a beta given how polished and smooth the user experience is. A little bloating on the other hand is pervading the desktop setup and maybe too many services are active by default. With 512mb RAM you will need to disable something to have a better experience but compared to some competing OS the situation is really good.
Comparing the Ubuntu 8.04 beta to my other Debian Lenny box with comparable hardware (laptops with 1gb ram and centrino 1.8GHz) Ubuntu feels much faster doing everything. I don't know if it's the kernel 2.6.24 with CFS or some optimization of the libc or something else but the difference is night and day. Debian should care a bit more about performance if it wants to stay the UNIVERSAL OS...
So, up to now: really good and two thumbs up for this "beta" (just a bit different from the stability of KDE 4 beta!....)
Happy dowloading!
marco
You could also look at innotek's VirtualBox. It's pretty fast if you've got an Intel or AMD CPU with the virtualization instructions, and there's a GPL version that lacks a few features like letting the VM see USB drives.
Another free option is Qemu Manager, which is a free Windows frontend to the free QEMU. Not as fast as VirtualBox on a virtualization-enabled PC, but not bad if you enable the KQEMU dynamic recompiler. There's also MS's Virtual PC, but IME QEMU and VirtualBox work a little better with Linux. And lastly, of course, there's VMWare Server, although IME it's a little harder to set up.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/
Torrents are down there at the bottom.
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent
http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-beta-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
- There's Fedora (which Redhat supports) which has the bleeding edge stuff that other distributions get the benefit of. PulseAudio is enabled in Hardy Heron which Fedora 8 currently has it. BTW Fedora 9 is being released around the same time as Hardy Heron
- There's CentOS which quoting them "... is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. ". That Linux vendor is redhat.
What you're paying for Redhat is the support which makes sense for business to have a safety net. There's nothing different software-wise (as far as I know) except that you have someone to call when some UH-OH happens.Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Did you try installing it to your master drive instead of a slave drive?
In addition to what other /.ers said about WUBI, there's also the possibility to use Live USB distribution.
/on the windows drive/ and adds a new entry to the Windows boot loader to make the system. So you boot you hard drive normally and then use Windows XP's boot menu to select Linux instead of WinXP).
PenDrive Linux has a lot of resources about this kind of distributions.
I've been using their Quick and easy Pendrivelinux for quite some time.
You can buy commercial preinstalled ones from companies like Mandriva Flash.
It works to a very similar way to WUBI, but on a flash drive.
Essentially it puts 2* big files that contain the file system on the USB drive, and make the USB stick bootable using "syslinux". You start it by hitting F12 when the BIOS starts and choose to boot on the USB drive instead of your hard drive.
(whereas WUBI puts a big file with the partition
So in that solution, your hard drive is virtually untouched (not that creating a file and adding an entry are *that* much big change) so it may please more the paranoid admins at your company.
Last-but-not-least there's also the running-Linux-inside-Virtualbox (or some other virtual machines that have native-speed performance) solution. It's a bit complicated, but has the benefit of letting you run your Linux apps along side the Windows desktop (with possibilities for native integration, either using a X-Window server for Win32, or using the virtual machine's client tools).
* - most Live USB solutions tend to use 2 files : one is a big read-only file containing the live system, the other is read-writeable and used to store and remember modification (newly installed software, upgrades, user settings, user's home, etc.) between session.
This is because most Live USB distribution are descendant of Live CD distribution (where the CD-Rom is read only and holds the live distro and a RAM-disk holds the modification, using a UNIONFS to bridge the 2 together).
The big advantage of this system is that in case of a big fuckup, you can still reboot using only the original live system (just like a LiveCD) and fix/rebuild/create a new read-write big file.
Of course there are also other solutions for partitioning and installing linux on a USB stick the same way you install it on a harddrive.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A working Linux system requires at least 3 parts:
/boot partition. Its location is unimportant as long as the bootloader know where to find it: you could put it on a FAT partition and use a DOS based bootloader like loadlin if you want. Nowadays the standard Linux bootloader is Grub, which understands many common Linux filesystems like ext3, jfs, reiserfs, so if you put you kernel on one if those filesystems it can boot.
.iso files. But that file must still reside on some other partition/filesystem that has already been mounted. So what Wubi does is, it installs the normal Ubuntu root filesystem in a single file, and puts that on your NTFS formatted Windows partition, along with the kernel (which can mount NTFS partitions read-write these days thanks to ntfs-3g), and the grub4dos bootloader. Grub4dos is a modified version of Grub, which can locate the kernel on NTFS disks, and can be chainloaded from the Windows NT bootloader (meaning, the NT bootloader can boot grub4dos which in turn boots the Linux kernel). Wubi packages all this in a user-friendly Windows installer. Note that although you can add and remove Ubuntu like other Windows apps, you cannot run it alongside them. This is _not_ emulation or virtualization, it's still dual booting, with the only twist that it leaves your existing Windows partitions untouched.
1) a root filesystem, where the bulk of the files that comprises the system reside
2) a kernel which understands your hardware (or at least the disk hardware and filesystem format and of the root filesystem, other parts can all be loaded as modules later on)
3) a boot loader, which is executed by the BIOS, and knows where to locate and execute the kernel
In most common Linux installs, the root filesystem resides on a dedicated partition on the first hard disk, usually in the ext3 format. The kernel is often a also in this partition, but can be in a seperate
Wubi makes use of the fact that the Linux kernel can mount single files as if they were disks/partitions. This is called loopback mounting a file, and many users have already used it at some point when mounting
To recap:
Normal Ubuntu startup
1) BIOS loads Grub
2) Grub loads the kernel from an ext3 partition (which also conains the root filesystem)
3) the kernel mounts the designated ext3 partition and uses that as the root filesystem (actually it starts off with initramfs, which is a root filesystem in memory that is swapped with the on-disk "real" root filesystem later in the boot process)
Wubi startup
1) BIOS loads the Windows bootloader NTLDR
2) when selected from the menu, NTLDR loads grub4dos
3) grub4dos loads the Linux kernel from the Windows partition
4) the kernel mounts the Windows partition, then mounts the file on that Windows partition where Ubuntu was installed in and uses that as the root filesystem
I use (the free) VMWare Server (not ESX) on Windows boxes for various Linux installs...including Ubuntu. I do not understand an earlier comment stating that VMWare Server is complex. You install it as a Windows application, fire it up, select "new VM", choose a linux distro (Ubuntu 32 and 64 are options) for the VM architecture, and away you go...you now have a VM ready for a Linux install. The Live Ubuntu CD works with no issues...as does the default Ubuntu install.
You can also tweak the number of processors, hard disk size, and memory that you assign to the VM, but VMWare suggests low-end (working) default values. I have run VMWare on numerous machines (laptops, desktops, servers) and it just plain works. It is a fantastic way to test out various distros without putting the Windows partition at risk. If you take the time to mount and install VMWare Tools in the VM's hosted OS, switching back and forth between the host and guest OSes (including copying and pasting) is a breeze. You can also have as many VMs (and OSes) installed as you please. Want to play with 8.04 without losing 7.10? No problem. Create a new VM.
Downsides include:
- It is virtualized. Thus, it is going to run significantly slower than a native install.
- You are limited by the types of hardware architectures that VMWare simulates. That said, I have not had issues getting any sound or graphics card to work...and the networking options are fantastic. I cannot get access to all four cores however. The free VMWare server only allows me to create a VM that simulates either 1 or 2 CPUs...and I am not sure how many cores the VMWare container is using.
- Memory...since Windows is still running, it needs its share. Thus, you need a lot.
Of course, on the positive side, Windows is still running...so you have access to whatever you need there (e.g., Outlook, games, whatever). You can also run in reverse, and run VMWare on Linux and install Windows in a VM, but I dare say that most of us are in a situation that requires (or prefers) the VMWare on Windows approach.
I assume that Windows is not running in the WUBI option and that Ubuntu is running right on the metal (not virtualized), with full access to the real hardware architecture and all of the memory. Putting the HD in a Windows file must have some performance impact, but most likely far less than the entire OS in a VM (which also uses the Windows file approach for the HD). Does anyone have anecdotal performance impressions for WUBI? It sounds very cool and a great option for someone who is not yet committed...but I will say that I am not much of a fan of modifying the boot loader, but perhaps I am just being overly skittish.
Steve
Here's what's I think is important (and new) Ubuntu 8.04 Beta, with my comments. There are more new things, but I don't care about them.
Xorg 7.3 - the main advantage should be easier configuration, especially in multi-monitor setups. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say. But it can only be better than what we have now.
Linux kernel 2.6.24 - The new & neat things here are dynticks for amd64 (power savings), the new CFS scheduler (you should experience less lags when your system is loaded). I'm mostly interested in the dynticks part.
PulseAudio - this is supposed to clean up the linux audio mess. I say wait and see.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 - I tried Beta 3 and it's *really* an advance over Firefox 2. I can't say that I personally witnessed any real speedups, but the new location bar is really cool. It takes a day or two to get used to it, but it really changes the way you surf.
Transmission - a new Bittorrent client. I'm using it regularly since months, and it *rules*. It's exactly the way a bittorrent client should be.
Brasero - a new CD/DVD burning program. I have never used it, but I can only hope that it is the way Nero 5 was.
World clock for the clock applet - that's really handy. Never type "what's the time in california" into google again!
Virtualization - it's supposed to be some super-easy and clicky integration of virtualization. I'm looking forward to it.
There's a small difference. UMSDOS was a (ugly, but useful) hack that allowed to use FAT files and directories as if they were UNIX-like files and directories. So even if you booted in MSDOS/win you could read the linux files. WUBI is different: It stores a whole Linux filesystem in a file. Wubi then mounts the NTFS filesystem with NTFS-3G, and the big file containing the linux filesystem is mounted with the loop device as an ext (or reiser, or whatever) filesystem.
http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/got_questions_quxz.html
#!/usr/bin/english
I was using the 8.04 Alpha 6 for the past few days on a T60, and so far I am pleased with the new audio system. It sounds as good as it ever has (I would say slightly better in a couple of cases, but that is a bit subjective). I have had no errors so far, and it automatically handles the connection and removal of a USB sound device very smoothly.
I am exactly a power user as far as audio systems go, but music and videos, along with application sounds, have all been working great. I know I heard of some problems with Skype, but that seems to mainly apply to poor coding on Skype itself, and I have not tried it personally.
I partially agree, however, pulseaudio is a full-featured, low-latency audio server. What's missing is app support. While I don't entirely agree with it, this seems to be a move to force applications to support pulseaudio. The Ubuntu developers will probably be writing patches for a number of libraries and applications and sending them upstream. For legacy ALSA and OSS applications, there is pasuspender (pause pulseaudio and give a single app direct ALSA access) and padsp (emulate an OSS device for an application, send its audio to a pulseaudio output). Hopefully we will soon see pulseaudio support in the major audio libraries (PortAudio etc.) ALSA already includes a compatibility drive where you can create a virtual "pulse" device to send output to pulseaudio.
BTW about latency, I tested JACK running on top of PulseAudio on my system with a generic integrated soundcard, and got <2ms without hardware monitoring. <flamebait>Try that under any Windows soundserver.</flamebait>
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I would simply make a ghost image of your work laptop as is before installing any other OS. And dual boot between Linux and Windows. When you are required to turn in the laptop, simply reimage the laptop with your original settings, and all are none the wiser.
Hello, even if not recommended for, a main machine (at home), I've installed 8.04 beta. I cleaned the system partition (/home is safe elsewhere) and made a fresh reinstall. My current installation has several upgrades on it and I want a good LTS, free of old stuff.
/home for users, so you will have to add them manually... The problem is that the GUI to add/change groups don't let you assign a new user to an existing /home/stuff dir. Also, nautilus (running as root) is broken when you try to change the ownership of something.
My first impressions... The theme is almost the same, the menus are the same, but there are some theme inconsistency between windows...some processes lunched by root get a different theme. Emerald not working.
the new applications rock, lots of changed applications, upgrades and beta software... As an LTS I think the developers chose soft that may be maintained longer, even if it is still in beta.
By the way, Firefox 3B4 integration with gnome is fantastic.
Only a thing that is not so good. If you have multiple accounts in the computer, the installer won't scan
All hardware running well, no strange things happening. Yet. Congratulations and many thanks to the ubuntu dev team.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
You can update to the current Hardy Heron beta by typing 'update-manager -d' in your console. I upgraded from Gutsy just fine, but be warned - it is still in beta. YMMV
What not just use VMWARE Server....it is free, and there is already plenty of information on it. Just install VMWare server, then run Ubuntu in that....My work laptop is a Dell D630 with 2 GB of RAM and it runs ubuntu 8.04 just fine as a Virtual Machine.
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WUBI won't interfere with your windows partition. You can get rid of it by simply deleting your c:\wubi folder or by going into your add/remove programs and uninstalling it. You can also run the installer provided by WUBI. If you choose to just delete the folder you will still have to contend with the boot menu item. You can delete that by modifying the c:\boot.ini file.
/boot/grub/menu.conf customization. This is pretty bad and it is a serious bug, yet there seems to be no attention going to that either.
WUBI is an optional way to install Linux. The 8.04 ISO image is designed to be booted and run as a live CD where you choose the install icon off the gnome desktop. Just like the old way.
The WUBI way, the reason for the wubi.exe in the root of the CD, is so you can put it into your CD/DVD drive and have it autoplay or just launch it. That way you don't have to search for it to test the installer.
I have WUBI installs on multiple machines. It runs just fine. I have performed various upgrades to it over time without issue. It is running as its own OS and not as some emulation or virtual machine. It runs very well and it can take advantage of your full Windows partition. In fact, when you get WUBI successfully installed it will mount your Windows paritition with NTFS-3G, showing it as the HOST drive. You can read/write to it just like you would any NTFS partition under Windows.
I have Linux running on multiple laptops thanks to WUBI. I could have done a dedicated partition but I liked the idea of working with it in this fashion to help the developers. I also have many computers that run Linux dedicated and a few machines that run Windows dedicated.
My only word of advice to perspective WUBI users is to give the WUBI install size the largest you can so you don't run out of room. The reason is you'll get very addicted to Linux and Ubuntu and want to try more things out and it doesn't pay to not have enough room, so choosing a small amount of space to test with is not sufficient.
Linux is used world wide and there are estimates of 50 million users world-wide. Whole governments are using it on the desktop. Linux performs well and is very stable and secure. It does 99% of what 90% of us want to do with it. There are even retail games that have Linux clients. Linux has more in-kernel support for drivers than any other kernel in OS history.
I don't know about the weaknesses of things like wireless support under 8.04. I do know they must be improved to capture more of the market. Hopefully that has happened. I also don't know the state of sound for laptops, as it has been a rather weak point for Ubuntu these past couple years, especially on the HP platform where HPs most commonly sold models didn't have adequate sound support (or it was too buggy and too confusing to resolve).
I will say that there has been a down hill slide in the #ubuntu IRC as the participants are far to quick to spam the guides without reading the actual appeals for help.
Other than that, I think some of the attempts they made with the graphical auto adjustment have failed miserably and I don't expect that they have resolved the issue this time around either. I would like to see this fool proof. Unfortunately, also there are many other issues that I think won't get the resolutions they need because there are some issues with someone setting the priorities. For instance, laptop wireless and sound are important, and so is mounting of secondary and other volumes. Too much manual work has to be done just to add a second, third, forth, HDD. Adding those and plugging in USB and other removable media can result in some extremely unexpected results. Even though this has been reported no effort is being made to resolve them, or so it seems. Further, updates to the OS via the online updates can completely wipe out a custom
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The LTS versions are every two years. (every 4th of the 6 month releases)
I had the same problems. Look at your video card and the drivers used. If you are using an NVIDIA card to run dual monitors, get away from the 169 drivers and go with the older ones on the NVIDIA site. Then go through your configuration in nvidia-settings and modify your xorg.conf file. Worked for me.
PYROPHOR
From my point of view and experience with PulseAudio, it's most of the times ALSA, which is not communicating correctly with PulseAudio. Also PulseAudio's HAL module seems to have some problems too. See this bug report from ALSA: https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=2601
Also Ubuntu is just beta, so it's not stable yet. Also because of the problems existing with the current audio situation on Linux, it's a good decision to make PulseAudio default. It has communication layers with almost all possible audio servers/API's on Linux. It has good sound mixing capabilities. It can transfer audio via network, which is also an advantage for LTSP. It is cross-platform compatible, so it runs on Windows as well. So eventually it will make things a lot easier for managing audio stuff.
I hope they will improve the compatibility with PulseAudio. Also I hope that Skype will get support for PulseAudio.
Yes. There has been a fully functional NTFS driver for a while now.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Installing Ubuntu 8.04 beta using WUBI can leave your system unbootable, and the filesystem not fully recoverable. It just happened to me. I installed through WUBI and got to a the Ubuntu desktop, after rebooting to go back to Windows, it halted halfway in the boot sequence. I'm not the only one, their are several others on the forums with the same problem.
I have been upgrading to the Ubuntu "beta" release some 2 months before the official release for some 2 years now. Hardy is the one that gave me the most trouble so far. Never had to fill so many bug reports.
I tried it on my plain old Dell machine that successfully ran 7.10, 7.04, 6.10, and 6.04. This one is broken. I hear the startup sound and see the orange background for a second, and then it blanks out and sits at a black screen forever.
But the really great thing is that I can still do most of my work under linux, and that stuff doesn't get lost when Windows decides to crash
As for WUBI, btw, it seems like it creates a dual-boot setup for windows, but one that uses a file within the windows disk as the basis for its file system. So it's not like having linux running within Windows, it's just like booting into linux but without having to do a repartition of your drive.