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."

Comments

WUBI?

[scubamage]

Anyone have any information about this? I prefer having a linux environment but my work laptop *must* run windows thanks to company software. This seems like it may be a much better solution for me compared to, say, cygwin.

Re:WUBI?

[SpecTheIntro]

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.

Re:WUBI?

[binaryspiral]

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.

Re:WUBI?

[SpydeZ]

If you *must* run windows for company apps, then Wubi probably isn't for you. It's more of a dual-boot type thing, cept it uses a file on your windows partition as it's 'hard drive'.

You might want to try out andLinux. It's a full on linux that integrates seamlessly inside of windows.

Personally, dual-booting is kind of a drag because of the constant reboots to get into Windows to do that one Windows-only thing, so I like cygwin or andLinux over Wubi.

Re:WUBI?

[strabes]

My advice is to wait for the final release of hardy, which should be rock solid stable. It is still decently buggy at this point.

Re:WUBI?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's like UMSDOS? A good idea though, ZipSlack was the easy way to try Linux that got me started.

Re:WUBI?

[Nimey]

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.

Re:WUBI?

[Anonymous Coward]

A working Linux system requires at least 3 parts:
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 /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.

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 .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.

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

Re:WUBI?

[diegocgteleline.es]

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.

Re:WUBI?

[jslater25]

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.

Re:WUBI?

[anexkahn]

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.

Re:WUBI?

[MyDixieWrecked]

A friend of mine actually used Wubi a couple days ago- it was the first I'd heard of it.

Installation went without a hitch. It basically created a couple of disk-image type files on his C: partition and Ubuntu boots from that.

It's pretty neat because when you look at the output from the 'df' command, your drives aren't mounting from /dev, but rather /media/wubi

Re:WUBI?

[Oldstench]

I understand that this is not the forum for this, but this intrigued me. I would love to dual boot between Linux and Windows, but don't want to lose everything that I already have on my Windows box. Would it be possible for me to Ghost my existing Windows machine, format and create the dual-boot, and then reimage what I had to my new Windows partition? I only wonder because I don't know how well Ghost would handle the disk size changes.

Re:WUBI?

[dotancohen]

I second VirtualBox. VMWare ran Solidworks like a dog, but Virtualbox runs it perfectly.

Re:WUBI?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm waiting for Wubi on Wails.

Re:WUBI?

[Sczi]

That will work fine, but there are ways to shoot yourself in the foot, and there is an extra step in there at you don't need. But as long as your ghost backup is good, then the worst that could happen is you might need to reapply the image and then do whatever you need to do like defrag or whatever, take another image, and then try again. And for future reference, applying a ghost image to a smaller partition than you took it from will work fine most of the time, and the times it won't work is because of something else.

But like I said you don't need to take an image and then reapply it. The more direct approach is to defrag so that you get a big contiguous block of space at the end of the drive, shrink the Windows partition (Vista can shrink the C: while windows is running, otherwise find a util), and then make a new partition at the end for whatever.

Either way, take a good ghost image first. Ghost is the greatest thing since jarred cheese.

Re:WUBI?

[ShieldW0lf]

Use VMWare. You can use tools from VMWares site to convert your existing Windows installation to a virtual machine, then install VMWare server on Ubuntu using the GUI, grab a license key for free from VMWares site, and fire up your newly created virtual machine. Then you shouldn't lose anything, and you can run them both simultaneously.

Re:WUBI?

[BlackCreek]

My advice is to wait for the final release of hardy, which should be rock solid stable. It is still decently buggy at this point. I second that. There are loads of broken things in Hardy right now.

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.

1. They made a truly royal mess with scim (sorry you can't uninstall).
2. My bluetooth headset doesn't work anymore.
3. They are using a new wireless driver (for intel) that is giving me loads of trouble.
4. The time it takes for desktop logout on KDE has increased.
5. Amarok sometimes fails to start.
6. Sometimes I simply lose the keyboard (must then logout with the mouse).

Re:WUBI?

[shellbeach]

Anyone have any information about this? I prefer having a linux environment but my work laptop *must* run windows thanks to company software. This seems like it may be a much better solution for me compared to, say, cygwin. I have the same problem, but I get around it on my linux laptop by running XP within VirtualBox (which is free and doesn't need for a license key like VMWare). You can pause the virtual machine when you're not using it, have the desktop resize with the virtual machine window, and there's even stuff like bi-directional clipboard support. Setting up shared directories between the host OS and the virtual OS is also extremely easy. I remember trying to setup VMWare back in 2000, and the distance virtual machines have come since then is just amazing. If you haven't tried it for a while, it's really worth giving them another go.

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.

Bah

[Garrick68]

I am waiting for the Hungry Hippo version of Ubuntu...

Re:Bah

[BrentH]

It appears Hateful Hillary is postponed in favor of Ostentatious Obama. What happened to Mediocre McCain, I don't know.

Re:Bah

[tanguyr]

http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/got_questions_quxz.html

Re:Bah

[kat_skan]

Why, he's keeping quiet and letting the Discourteous Donkeys do his work for him, of course.

wubi ?

[bibel]

To ease the transition of Windows users, it includes Wubi, which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. That's just great ... Ubuntu like any other Windows application. I am losing faith in humanity

Re:wubi ?

[HermMunster]

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.

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 /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.

Re:Still free?

[Computershack]

I saw on the Kubuntu pages the other day they are forking into 2 versions, one free ( 'with limited functionality') and a commercial version with 8.04. Is the parent Ubuntu heading that way too? It was certainly how Mandrake and Redhat went. Sucker people in for a couple of years with free versions then release payware ones with all the stuff you want on whilst releasing stripped out crippleware free versions.

Sweet Stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Just installed the amd64 version on my quad core box. I am really liking the goodies -

Startup is quicker than previous version on the same hardware. Filesystems are now mounted with 'realtime' flag out-of-box - yay for even more speed!
I was able to install it inside of Windows (Vista x64) without any performance loss using the Wubi installer - Ubuntu entry appeared in Windows boot loader and I did not had to partition my NTFS formatted disks - you can try and see how it works without losing data or even disk space when you am done trying it. Cool.

Firefox 3 - my favorite browser is bundled and integrated - can't ask for more!

Got to try KVM /virtio - KVM is something that never worked well for me.

Re:Sweet Stuff

[Nimey]

'realtime' No. That's "relatime". See here for an explanation.

Re:Still free?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Still free?

[NDPTAL85]

During the time that RH and Mandrake didn't do this, weren't THEY suckers too for thinking you could run a business without charging for ... well anything?

No limited functionality. Still free.

[Svenne]

'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.

Re:No limited functionality. Still free.

[Svenne]

I still don't see how you get to that conclusion. The difference between them is the availability of commercial support for the KDE 3 edition, while there is no support (or, community support only) for the KDE 4 edition.

Both of them will still be free. I think it's quite clear.

Re:No limited functionality. Still free.

[Falstius]

You're misunderstanding what they mean by that comment.

Since 8.04 is a long term support (LTS) release which will be supported for years, they don't want to include the still incomplete KDE4. So the only version you can choose to buy commercial support for will use KDE 3. And since a lot of their users don't care about commercial support, there is still the unsupportable KDE4 option.

In short, Kubutu with KDE 4 is missing features because KDE 4 is missing features, not so that Canonical can make money. Both versions are available for free (without paid support).

ubuntu a windows application

[dspolleke]

which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application.

Since when is Ubuntu a windows application? It isn't even an application.. It is a Linux distribution. If Wubi get's out into the world as "the way to install Ubuntu" noob users will assume they need Windows to install a Linux distro.. why is no one creating an app to turn it around? You can convert your Windows partition to a VMware disk and save it to an USB disk or network store.. Install a Linux distro, install a Virtual Machine player (Innotek virtualbox, VMware) put the disk back and load windows from within Linux.. And install and uninstall windows like any other Linux distribution software package

Typo - Ubuntu community members attention!

[sundarvenkata]

Can somebody change the typo "relatime" to "realtime" in this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/beta Thanks, Sundar

Re:Still free?

[cerelib]

Kubuntu

            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.

Not a typo

[GerbilSoft]

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.

Re:Still free?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

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.

Promising beta: performance and very few bugs

[zborro]

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

Re:Still free?

[nurb432]

Charging for support/consulting is something that money can be made on. You don't have to cripple your product in the process.

Re:torrent?

[kaos07]

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

Re:Still free?

[cbart387]

Please explain your redhat comment please.

1. 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
2. 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.

PulseAudio

[quanticle]

How's the PulseAudio decision working out so far? I've run into lots of PulseAudio problems in Fedora (which enabled it by default in Fedora 8), so its a little bit surprising that Ubuntu has decided to enable PulseAudio by default. Personally, I don't think PulseAudio is yet ready for mainstream use, so I'm wondering what the justification for this decision was.

Alternative : LiveUSB

[DrYak]

In addition to what other /.ers said about WUBI, there's also the possibility to use Live USB distribution.
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 /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).

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.

Re:Still free?

[Dragonslicer]

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 KDE4 version will use the same repositories, so there won't be any packages found in only one version. KDE4 will be in the standard repositories (not sure if it'll be in main or universe), so you can install it from the KDE3 version of 8.04. The only difference between the two versions is which version of KDE is installed initially.

** How does this compare with VMWare server perf?

[scuba_steve_1]

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

What's new

[Aaron Isotton]

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.

KDE4

[spikenerd]

I installed Kubuntu beta with KDE4. Almost everything just worked.

Had a tiny issue with KNetworkManager. It only wanted to recognize one network card at a time. I had to manually edit /etc/network/interfaces to fix it. That's the only old-style hackery I had to do. Did everything else via the GUI.

Now it's functioning as a gateway, interfaces with Windows machines on my home network via samba, set up apache and all that stuff. KDE4 is a bit tough to customize. The features are pretty sparse. I can't tell my clock to display seconds, it's really inconvenient to move icons around on the taskbar--gotta go through many menues, etc., but I suppose this will get better with time.

Summary: KDE4 isn't done, but it looks like it will be nice. Almost everything just works.

Forcing App Support

[chunk08]

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>

Problems with Wine by default

[TheBlunderbuss]

Compiz/Beryl takes away OpenGL resources, and pulseaudio doesn't work right with ALSA, let alone the ALSA Wine driver.
I'll be spending so much more time telling people to turn that stuff off.

Oh thank you so much, Ubuntu team!

Already installed

[cuby]

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.

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 /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.

All hardware running well, no strange things happening. Yet. Congratulations and many thanks to the ubuntu dev team.

Re:Already installed

[cuby]

well... I posted a new idea about importing existing ubuntu accounts. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5320/
let's see if it rises some interest.

Re:Can you upgrade with this?

[Flooded77]

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

Re:** How does this compare with VMWare server per

[scuba_steve_1]

My empirical evidence shows otherwise. That may be due to a range of factors...not the least of which is the fact that the VM creates a hardware architecture that is more generic and thus, you may not have access to optimized drivers for your specific hardware (e.g., graphics card). The fact that an entire windows stack is running underneath the VMWare server application also cannot be understated, however, regardless of how efficient the VMWare Server application is. Keep in mind, I am talking about (the free) VMWare server...and not VMWare ESX.

BTW, this isn't just theoretical for me. I have numerous VMWare Server installs.

One example, I have Ubuntu 7.10 installed on two devices at home:

1) Installed as the actual OS on a 5 year-old Compaq laptop with 512 MB of RAM (and it was a budget laptop the day that I bought it new)

2) Installed in VMWare on a intel-based quad core Q6600 with 4GB of RAM, an 8800GT GPU, and a 10k Raptor Hard Drive...running XP SP2 as the base OS.

The compaq laptop Ubuntu performance absolutely SMOKES Ubuntu running in VMWare in the Q6600...even when the Q6600-based PC is running nothing beyond anti-virus, anti-spyware, and other lighter weight services. I don't have CPU mark tests, so I apologize for throwing out an assessment without objective measures to base it...but I stand by it. I will try to run some tests to isolate the GPU factor however, since I really believe that is a large part of the issue. Native graphic drivers are just plain better.

Dual monitors in Hardy

[SEMW]

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. Having had a rather bad time trying to get dual monitors set up in Gutsy, I've just tried the new screen applet (using the vanilla auto-configured xorg.conf).

Looked pretty good at first; it shows the two monitors side by side, showing the one I hadn't been using with a screen resolution set to 'off'. I set that to 1152x864, and pressed 'apply': Lo and behold, it turned on and showed my desktop at that resolution -- except that the monitor I had been using before was now set to 'off'. I used the applet to turn that monitor on, it did so -- and turned my secondary monitor back off.

The old 'Screens and Graphics' manager is still installed, only it's been moved over to the 'applications' menu for some reason. It still works identically to how it worked in Gutsy. By which I mean: not at all.

Not impressed.

Upgrade to 7.10 was broken, is this better?

[spitzak]

Rather annoyed at Ubuntu. It worked great on my Dell Precision M90 laptop in 6.? (whatever the one before this was). I upgraded to 7.10 and the sound, wireless, and suspend all broke.

I managed to fix them by doing a lot of Google and package installation (here is what worked: the sound required the installation of something like "ubuntu_backports". The wireless (an Intel chip) required the installation of the i386 drivers (as opposed to the "generic" drivers used by the non-default version of the kernel). The suspend required installation of something called "ps_suspend" though I tried a lot of scary-looking other suggestions before this worked, with the annoying fact that I had to reboot every time a test failed. I'm quite certain that most people would not have figured out or tried any of these. (hint for googling: use the animal name, ie "gutsy")

Normally you can blame lack of hardware manufacturer support and/or lack of resources to test things, but not when it worked in the previous version AND the system can be fixed to work in the new version.

From my Google searching it sounds like a lot of people complained about the lack of such quality compared to the previous Ubuntu.

Any word on whether I can expect the same, better, or worse from this new version?

Re:Still free?

[HermMunster]

KDE 4.0 has some fundamental problems. They tried to somewhat mimic the Vista start menu and essentially failed. They were trying to shoot the prairie dog and killed the horse by mistake. IMHO they created an ugly weak and problematic menu.

Other things are that KDE 4.0 was released early so that developers could work on it to help resolve issues and create new features. In the end, as far as end users are concerned tho, if they chose to use it as an early adopter they will have to put up with some extremely messy looking features.

I've looked at it and after some time dropped it. It was messy as hell and had some real organizational issues. Even the icons on the desktop are kludgy. They can easily get disorganized and spread around thus creating a messy desktop. They are extremely buggy and the desktop itself can be inadvertently moved off center of the screen with no hopes of moving it back, unless you restart KDM.

Conceptually, it is a good first start, but I'd say it is about a year out before it becomes anything really useful to the average person. This makes it an obvious choice for limited support.

KDE needs serious work, but it is the future of their desktop. It is a good first try, though buggy as all hell.

Re:Wow... ANOTHER version?

[tkiesel]

The LTS versions are every two years. (every 4th of the 6 month releases)

The Real Question Is.....

[RobDude]

Will Ubuntu 8.04 support my wireless usb network adapter? It's a LinkSys WUSB300N.

And by 'support' I mean, install Ubuntu and have it work. Not edit this, hack that, download the windows driver, run this emulator, reconfigure this thingamabob and so on and so forth. And by 'support' I mean, be able to use it - you know, not just be able to go online but be able to encrypt data using WEP or any of the other methods available to me in Windows.

Not trying to be a jerk or anything; but to me this is the ultimate test for Linux. When it works with the hardware I already own.

Of course, fanboys will tell me that everything already does work (or so they've been claiming for years now). In Ubuntu 7 my wireless adapter didn't work. Rumors of people getting it to work using ndiswrap (provided you use the right version of ndiswrap and edit/change a million different settings and then, WEP didn't work).

If it DOES work, on a fresh install; I'd actually like to reinstall Ubuntu.

Re:The Real Question Is.....

[PCM2]

You can't very well blame the extremely hardworking Ubuntu and Linux kernel developers when hardware manufacturers actively block their attempts to write drivers, refuse to release specs, etc. Sure, it would be another success for Linux if it could support your device without using the Windows drivers. But you act as if it's a failure for Ubuntu when you try to use incompatible hardware with it. In future, try to buy from vendors whose hardware is at least possible to support under Linux.

VOIP Clients Need Love under pulseaudio on Ubuntu

[j0ebaker]

The move to pulseaudio as the default sound systems is welcomed.  It's mastry of emulating OSS, ALSA and ESound are simply awesome and supposedly these are emulated more efficiently than the origtional competing sound systems.
The problem is that there is an alsa compatibility library that needs to be fixed ASAP before this distribution gets released.

To see the breakage just run the VoIP client named Ekiga and get into it's audio wizard.  It just hangs there.

I've been studying long and hard to learn Asterisk and I'll be damned if I will run a distribution that can't provide audio to SIP client software on my laptop.

https://answers.launchpad.net/alsa-plugins/+question/27568

I was an early adopter of pulseaudio on my 7.10 laptop and have suffered not being able to run voip clients such as:
  X-Lite
  iaxcomm
  Ekiga
  Twinkle
  Kphone

I really like Ubuntu, but I'm concerned they may loose significant market share if they don't resolve this matter FAST in the beta stages of 8.04.

-Joe Baker
GPG Key ID DDEC0260

Re:Actually

[lawn.ninja]

He's just afraid of his OS becoming mainstream, because then he'll have to start using BeOS to be cool. I mean running what everyone else does is so uncool.

Re:loopmounted filesystem

[Chandon Seldon]

Don't you need a NTFS driver to read the disk image off of the loop mounted partition, and to be able to write back to it?

Yes. There has been a fully functional NTFS driver for a while now.

Needs work

[MeditationSensation]

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.