Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu 8.04 Released
Nate2 writes "The Hardy Heron has taken flight: it's the second LTS (Long Term Support) release of the world's most popular distro. New features include the Wubi Windows installer and Firefox 3 beta 5. Grab a copy here, and check out Linux Format's overview of the release."
I seem to be stuck at 98%....
The server was overloaded; it's back up now, but in case it becomes unstable again... Cached lists of mirrors (for all versions):
* http://www.ubuntu.com.nyud.net/getubuntu/downloadmirrors
* http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubuntu.com%2Fgetubuntu%2Fdownloadmirrors
Torrent for 8.04 desktop version i386 ISO:
* http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso.torrent
* http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/4153415/Ubuntu_8.04_Hardy_Heron_-_Desktop_i386.4153415.TPB.torrent
(Piratebay mirror because official tracker is unstable)
Direct links to 8.04 desktop version i386 ISOs:
* http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://mirrors.rit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://ubuntu.media.mit.edu/ubuntu-releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://banner.uits.indiana.edu/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
* http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/8.04/ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso
Don't forget Kubuntu!
There are some of us who don't (or kan't) run Gnome...
Summation 2
AFAIK, since this is a LTS (Long Term Support) release, they went with the beta Firefox so there wouldn't be major shocks when Mozilla stopped updating 2.x and Ubuntu updated everyone to 3.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
The Boston University Linux Users Group is providing a .torrent-only mirror that should be able to be easily reached regardless of traffic. It's often difficult to fight through the hordes around the other servers just to get a torrent file, so we felt this would be convenient. We also have a copy of the MD5SUMS if you need it.
ftp://lug.bu.edu/pub/distro/ubuntu/
Contains the alternate, desktop, and server torrents for both i386 and amd64.
Hope this helps.
As usual with Ubuntu they seem happy to ship whatever state it's in on the official launch date.
I'm not trolling here, I'm running Hardy myself, but for a supposedly 'hardy' long term support release it's still pretty buggy for me. Sound in Flash stopped working yesterday (for plenty of other people too by the look of the bug on launchpad), I have to re-enter my WPA password every time I boot, and font hinting isn't working for gnome-terminal and KDE based apps.
Hohum...
http://193.147.168.122/ubuntu/
Please, always check MD5SUMS
My video card didn't work, sound didn't work, and, apparently, I use stale software with has been deprecated.
Either way, here's a review of my adventures:
http://thomer.com/howtos/hardy_heron.html
Here's a summary of the woes described on that web page:
1) to get nvidia to work for a GeForce 8600 GTS (and in my case TwinView, for two displays), you need to download a beta driver straight from nvidia,
2) to get sound to work you need to run a completely undocumented /etc/init.d/alsa-utils reset,
3) Firefox 3 (beta) is cool and all, but it does not support various plugins so I downgraded to firefox-2, and
4) xmms, which is ugly but worked just fine, has been deprecated and its replacement, audacious segfaults and freezes.
5) I got annoyed by trackerd hosing my disk and my CPU, so I removed it.
Hope this helps.
Ubuntu releases based on a schedule (1 major release every 6 months, 1 release with long term support every 2 years), not when software is completely "ready". The merits of this can be argued by better geeks than I (I'll continue to use 7.10 on my desktop for a month, but 8.04 is going on my lappy pronto).
If you need completely stable software you should use another distro (Debian comes to mind) or wait a month or two.
wasn't slashdot this time, the things just wildly popular.
Well more than curious. It looks pretty slick.
And I am really not asking to be flamed here, but can someone tell me why I might want to move from Windows to Ubuntu? Either for home (World of Warcraft has to run on it) or from work?
(Puts on asbestos boxers)
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
I found a nice page for downloading all the .torrent files that doesn't seem to be overwhelmed yet. It even lists torrents for the 8.04 DVD and PowerPC versions!
http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/
----- "I'm still sane on three planets and two moons."
NTFS read/write access has stable for a long time. No need for FAT32.
You don't need an external harddisk or usb-stick. Ubuntu won't disturb Windows.
Just download, burn and boot the live cd, then click the install icon. Ubuntu will guide you smoothly into making some space and dual-booting.
Don't Panic
So from the review there are several new features here that might be of use:
So it sounds like a couple of useful new features and probably more the review did not cover. opefully I'll give it a test run tonight.
Firefox 2 is in the software repository, so it's easy to install. Look either in Synaptic or in add/remove programs.
The easiest way would probably be to use Wubi, which installs the ubuntu system as an application inside your Windows install (or something like that, haven't tried it myself as I don't have Windows installed).
If you choose to install ubuntu on another drive and dual boot your ubuntu install should be perfectly capable at reading your NTFS partitions (helped a friend back up his stufs from a borked XP install just last weekend, worked great), I'm not sure about writing to NTFS partitions though, but it might work.
I never apologize. I'm sorry, but that's just the way I am.
from http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com/2008/04/faq-hardy-upgrade.html
Why is Firefox 3 beta 5 included? It's beta!
* Firefox 2 will not continue to get security updates from Mozilla long enough to be in an LTS release. FF3b5 is in very good shape, and the final release is due in June. June is also when 8.04.1 is due, which will include all updates up to that point on an updated iso image, and also (I expect) FF3 final.
btw. LTS means its supported for the next 3 years.
Nah it's storing *something* but it seems to be the password in hex form which it's then applying as though it were ASCII or latin1 or whatever they use for passphrases.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
I upgraded from 7.10 to 8.04;
I like the new compiz-fusion plugins it includes.
Includes 3d windows for the cube (Where the windows stick off of the walls), this new "Shelf" plugin, that makes it able to shrink the size of windows to a thumbnail where you can dock them to the side of your desktop or wherever. They also have an "Error notification" plugin which is neat- Gives you an alert whenever any program has an error, and you can specify how serious an error has to be before it notifies you. The notification is just a little popup on your notification area.
In the new Gnome, I really really like the new VNC client. It has a "bookmark" section to the side, and it has tabs. Tabs for VNC! I love it. The other really useful thing it has is a "VNC scanner", which scans computers on the domain for VNC ports to connect to, and gives you a nice list. Besides that, there isn't really much else great about the new Gnome- They try to keep things "simple" (A.K.A., not much customization to be done.)
I've had a couple problems so far with Ubuntu 8.04, though. The first noticeable problem was that only one window on my desktop had a border. I.E, if I switched from one window to another, the window I switched to would lose it's border and title bar, and the new window would get borders and a title bar. I fixed this by installing Xgl, apparently I didn't have it.
The other issue is these odd black dots.. They consist of maybe four pixels making a block. There's about 10 of them in a row on my screen, even when I do the cube and other things, they stay on top of everything. Even in my log in window. I have no idea what's causing it.
And, finally, my sound isn't working now. But I see a lot of people are having this problem.
Oh, and one more con- The "Unlock" button for network manager is really annoying. I'm not sure why it was needed, maybe someone can enlighten me?
Most modern distros will overwrite the XP bootloader with GRUB the linux bootloader. However GRUB will detect windows and present it as a boot option so its pretty much seamless.
To prepare, use partition manager in windows to free up some space on one of your drives, then install linux in the free space. As above GRUB will detect windows partition seamlessly.
If you ever want to revert to windows bootloader, just boot off the XP disk, go into recovery console and type a command which I can't remember but googling will reveal it very quickly (its something like fixmbr).
NTFS is fine with a driver called ntfs-3g, may not be out of the box but it is usually easily obtainable via an update. In Ubuntu it will be a one-line command to install, same as installing anything (you will love this about linux) as long as you have an internet connection. There will be a general 'install X package' commmand, from memory in ubuntu its 'sudo apt-get XXX'.
However this will only install the driver, you will probably have to manually mount the windows partition via either the mount command or editing your fstab which is the file linux uses to determine what file systems to mount.
Personally if its ur first go I would install linux on a spare box to have a tinker first. I went down this path for a year before I was game enough to muck with my 'production' desktop.
The critical thing is to have another working computer with the internet available so you can look up instructions on the fly whilst you're in linux in case you can't get something to work in linux that also kills your web browsing. Once you have google at your disposal, your issues (barring bad-luck hardware incompatibilities) are all solvable and someone out there will have solved it already and posted a solution for you, often with cut-and-paste commands to follow.
Have fun, and don't get discouraged - remember it took you however many years to learn what you know about windows, and for the first few weeks it will feel like learning how to walk again. Remember: most of what you know about PCs is actually what you know about WINDOWS, so don't be surprised when things are done differently in linux (on the upside it generally makes perfect sense). But in the long run it will pay off. The great thing is that in linux everything is controlled via human readable text files, no registry hunting required, even if you don't know anything about X you can tell a lot from the config files and tonnes of issues can be solved by a simple and obvious parameter change.
Disclaimer: above is general linux advice from a Fedora user, I do not use ubuntu so your mileage may vary.
... or sudo apt-get install firefox-2
This bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/188226 causes synergy to sputter along unless its started under sudo or you recompiled your kernel with a different scheduler enabled.
Yes, the tracker is overloaded, but that's why we have DHT!
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:PKBGTUMADMQD7FXO7PLIZPGWQBLPRTEE
I've been running Hardy right up from Alpha 2 until the RC. It's a quality release. Only issue I've had so far is that the sound on my laptop (Vostro 1700, uses Intel HDA) is almost impossible to hear unless the sound is up all the way. I've read a few things to try and get it fixed, but that's not too high priority right now.
The installation is clean, it did a fantastic job auto-detecting my 3D hardware and setting up Compiz on both laptop and desktop (Intel X3100 and GeForce FX5500 respectively), and it's easy enough for grandma to use.
Kudos to the Ubuntu team.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
Some quick notes on wubi, since this is Slashdot and it's probably the neatest part of the new release. Wubi has existed for a while but this is the first ubuntu that includes it as part of the distro.
Wubi permits you to install and dork around with ubuntu from within Windows. It has a comfy GUI front-end that creates a virtual partition within a Windows file, sets up the boot manager, downloads Ubuntu and installs it within the virtual partition. Ubuntu then boots and mounts the virtual partition within the Win32 file system. The installed Ubuntu can see the old Win32 file system and optionally read and write it. Windows sees the virtual partitions as a couple large files. And Wubi avoids making any partition changes to the target disk. All pretty cool actually, and significantly lowers the barriers to test-driving Ubuntu. See http://wubi-installer.org/ .
Because Kde4.0.3 isn't even a beta-quality replacement for KDE 3.5 yet. Kontact isn't ported yet, Konqueror has SSL issues, and Plasma and xrandr don't get along.
Now I'm not knocking KDE, 4.0 was always intended to be a stable release of the LIBRARIES, not the apps. But that means it's still not ready for end-users yet.
Presumably Firefox is in better shape than this.
Instead of doing the bittorrent dance, I started having the disc shipped to me.
Physical media that isn't rewritable is a waste. For installing new VM's with Ubuntu, I don't even need to burn a disc, I just need an ISO file. For existing Ubuntu installations I just upgrade. For installing when I absolutely need physical media, burn a CD-RW (probably erasing an old version I had on the disk).
#!/
I did a dist-upgrade a few days ago and everything works fine apart from mucking up the screen resolution (everything looks so big). As it took 500+Mb to download, for the sake of an extra couple of hundred meg, you can download the ISO and have a CD for backup.
I've just installed a 710 server through apt-cacher. It went fine. I then tried installing 300k of debs I'd not used before and it crawled. That was using gb.ubuntu
I dont recommend it.
Yes, and there's two ways to do it.
The first way would be to set up a persistent directory on your windows partition. I think that just amounts to a folder in c: or called casper-rw or something. You should look up "ubuntu persistence" on google to get better instruction
The second method is new to Hardy, and it would involve using Wubi to install Ubuntu without formatting your drive or changing the partitions. My understanding is it creates a disk image file on your windows partition that ubuntu can boot from and save files, etc, to. I guess it's supposed to be just as good as regular install, with just a little less resilience to hard shutdowns. I'm not sure what it does to the bootloader, so you might want to look into that before your wreck anything
I haven't done either, exactly, though I did do the first making a bootable pendrive with persistence. Hope that helps.
I started testing 8.04 at alpha 3 and have tested every version since. I am sad to say that that every version I have tested locks up solid after 5 to 10 minutes. The bug has been filed and is being experience by quite a few people on a lot of different hardware.
I have put 7.10 back on my laptop and I will not be updating to 8.04 until the lock up bug is reported as being fixed.
Of course, it is working just fine on a lot of other hardware... So, do your self a favor and burn a live CD and test it for a few hours before you do the final upgrade and do a very careful and complete back up before you upgrade.
This is the first time I have had *any* problems with stability of an Ubuntu release and I have been using it for several years now and I have tested a lot of alpha and beta releases. I hope this is the last time I have any trouble with an Ubuntu release.
Stonewolf
In 8.04, you can use the Windows based installer (Wubi) instead.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
I did it 3 days ago using adept as recommended:
$ kdesu "adept_manager --dist-upgrade-devel"
The upgrade completed without any problems
"As usual with Ubuntu they seem happy to ship whatever state it's in on the official launch date."
Sure that's why we had 6.06. Oh. Wait!
They got ff3b5 in because it's good enough. I have been using it for a couple weeks and I can vouch for it. As for unusable parts, they did not include the KDE4 environment because it is, as of right now, very shaky.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
If you're having trouble with the updater because archive.ubuntu.com is down, you'll want to use a mirror.
/etc/hosts file:
Found no way of changing this nicely, so I added this line to my
194.169.254.10 archive.ubuntu.com
That's for gb.ubuntu.com, you might want to make it local.
Good luck.
One tip: if you use any kind of even slightly unusual X setup (such as dual monitors with Xinerama), back up your old xorg.conf and generate a fresh one with "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" before you upgrade. When you've upgraded, use new X.org 7.3 tools like xrandr to do whatever it is you're aiming for.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I set this up on an older machine as a "free" alternative to $600 Adobe video suite. This was for someone at work who needed to do simple editing and converting. It works pretty well for him to scan in videos from a $28 firewire card and convert to a dv stream. It's a nice package, and the audio syths that come with it are a fun way to waste an hour or more.
.ISO for people in the office. At least 2 of the DVD's I burned are confirmed to be installed by coworkers (or their kids) into "old" machines they had laying around their house. Keeping in mind that these "old junk" computers are nicer than my "new" one.
The theme is nice if you are into that look. Me, not so much, but the guy at work seems to enjoy bagging about how slick this looks. He also likes to tell everyone how easy it was for him to "setup". (By setup, he means change the default screen display font.)
Whatever--the install was probably just about as easy as changing the font--Ubuntu found all the hardware on the stock dell machine. That's more than I can say for Windows on the same hardware. (Broadcom network.)
I'm thrilled he has ditched Outlook and Internet Exploder for default browsing and is using Thunderbird to check his email on that computer. The Windows Vista machine officially issued to him is sitting there untouched for about three months in sleep mode. The clincher for him was after I installed the killer combination of: Automatix/Wine/Office 2003/IE6.0 (via IEs4Linux.)
I've since burned a few copies of standard 7.10 desktop
On my setup at home, I did grab some of the video editing tools included in ubuntu studio (cinepaint and the nonlinear video editor that I'm too lazy to click on Applications right now to get the name of.) Along with the above mentioned killer combo, these are installed into Ubuntu 7.10 and work very well.
Oh dear God--when did I become a Linux fanboy?