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."
And ladies and gentlemen, that is why I won't be be 'apt-get dist-upgrade' until next week. I swear, Ubuntu get's the world's worst slashdotting twice a year. I could download the alternate, but meh, I'm not that concerned. As a side rant, last week I installed the Kubuntu 8.04 Remix RC, and after two hours I retreated to 7.10. I have no doubt Ibex will be awesome, and I might even upgrade sooner to KDE4, but as of right now, it's not so good.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
(Note that I don't use Ubuntu or plan to use it any time in the very near future, so I really have no idea how easy it'd be to swap things out.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Thats why I got the beta a week ago ;) I was thinking ahead to this very day. Course when somethings didn't work right I was never sure if it was the code or if it was the OS. Speaking of if you get a java window that doesn't seem to display anything there is a bug with xgl. bug 48404
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I am very happy that there has been another LTS release (and on my birthday)! I've been running the beta and it has been very stable other than than the firefox alpha (which seems to work fine on my debian lenny box).
I am dissapointed that abiword 2.6 didn't make the cut, though. It is a great release, however the timing of things didn't work out. You can get some context on what happened at one of the developer's blog and the bug report. Seems there was a little tension involved. Also, here are the release notes for Abiword.
Being an LTS release, I wonder if they can get it backported? I don't think that usually happens with that drastic of an upgrade - is it just security updates that get backported? However, the Abiword team will not be supporting 2.4.x for the next 3 years so I hope that something along those lines is possible.
Oh well, off to compiling it myself. :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root
Instead of doing the bittorrent dance, I started having the disc shipped to me. You can order whatever you need from https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ - they do a great job of getting the discs shipped, free of charge, in a lot less time than what they indicate on the site.
I ask for 25 discs at a time, put a pile of them on my desk at work, and they're gone in a week. Here, have a Linux, it's free.
I'm running XP at home. I've got two large hard drives, not in a RAID. Were I to download this Ubuntu release, would it be easy to set up dual-booting? What's the best way to do that, assuming I don't want to upset by Windows install in any way? Would I need to use FAT32 on a drive to make it visible to both OSs? Is there a robust method to at least read NTFS in Linux? Would it make sense to install on a USB memory stick or an external hard drive?
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
If I download the torrent and burn it to disc, can apt-get do a dist-upgrade from the DVD?
Does it still have buggy sound support for the sound hardware on the eeePC? I was rather annoyed by it for the last beta release and I can't really see them having fixed it in such a short time which is sad as it otherwise ran quite well...
I tried to install the latest RC maybe a week and a half ago... I couldn't
For one, I couldn't install it at first. The GUI installer was coming up monochrome green, and you couldn't see half the buttons. That was after the first few attempts where X would fail to start period. It's not like I have new bleeding edge stuff I was trying to put it in, just an Athlon64 3200+, ATI 1300Pro, 500GB PATA w/windows XP, and a 160GB SATA where Ubuntu was *going* to go. Other distro's work and install fine (except one where GRUB was being a bitch, maybe because of the two different hard drives?)
On the tracker, I see four DVD ISOs each for x86 and x64 with the same name and different hashes, and slightly different sizes. Anyone know what gives?
What's new in the server edition? All the articles I've seen so far are desktop-centric.
Does anyone here with a D-Link wireless PCI card have any networking issues with this release? I know that when the previous one came out, I was having some issues getting Ubuntu to recognize my wireless card... WDA-2320, if I'm remembering correctly.
Living With a Nerd
I see lots of replies about ISO mirrors and download sites, but has anyone tried to perform a distribution upgrade from 7.10 yet? Any news on that? I assumed I'd give that a shot maybe tomorrow when server loads aren't quite as busy...
Well, the obvious reason you might want it is because it's cheaper - both in being free software and generally being able to run on cheaper hardware. Beyond that, though, it's all just personal preference.
Five years ago, I'd have recommended that you only move to Linux if you like to occasionally tinker with your computer. Or maybe if you like to occasionally remap things to be more productive or write your own scripts and bots. Regardless, in the years past, Linux was fun mostly because you got to look under the hood and play with it.
Ubuntu has done a good job of abstracting that in recent years, though. For the most part, it should be about as easy a change moving from Windows to Ubuntu as it would be in moving to a Mac or, from what I've seen, XP to Vista. That tinkering aspect is still lurking just beneath the surface, though. 99% of everything you want to do will be possible in easy point-and-click style. But be prepared when you download some old third-party software that isn't in the standard repositories that you may be expected to open up a terminal window and run some "make" commands or something in order to install it. That's just where Linux culture was pre-Ubuntu and still is for many.
That being said, I think Ubuntu is quite a bit more fun than Windows. All of the free software helps a bunch at work as I don't have to fight for money to buy new things all the time. There's also all of the eye-candy that you get with Compiz - some of which is just good for bewildering your friends (ie: raining desktop) but some of which is very useful for productivity (ie: desktop cube.)
Another good side to Ubuntu is the community. When you have a problem, run a quick Google search for it and you're likely to find a few forums where it's already being discussed. For the most part, the RTFM style of Linux "help" has abated in recent years and most people are happy to help where they can.
So in the end, it depends greatly on your personal preferences and what you expect from your OS. It also depends on what you expect for support and how much you're willing to do yourself when something breaks. If you've got a little time to play with it, Linux can be a lot of fun. If all you want from an OS is that it "just work" out of the box and you don't care what it does as long as it runs Office and gets you to Facebook... well Linux still might work but you're less likely to enjoy it.
This seems to indicate that it WON'T work, but that information is a month old. Anyone have a better experience?
That would, say, let me run ubuntu off of a live CD on a Windows machine but still be able store some stuff on the Windows machine? Like, if I have a company notebook, and I want to run Linux on the train, could I do that... without putting Linux on it?
This is my sig.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Has anyone here experience with this one? I'd like to give it a try.
Ubuntu Studio is "a multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu." It includes applications for audio and video creation and for graphic work. It also has the Linux kernel optimized for low latency.
http://ubuntustudio.org/
Download (not accessible at the moment):
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/hardy/release
Torrent mirror:
MD5: http://mma.users.ubuntustudio.org/Hardy-Torrents/MD5SUMS
i386: http://mma.users.ubuntustudio.org/Hardy-Torrents/ubuntustudio-8.04-alternate-i386.iso.torrent
AMD64: http://mma.users.ubuntustudio.org/Hardy-Torrents/ubuntustudio-8.04-alternate-amd64.iso.torrent
Where to start? Let's see:
- It's free.
- I can reinstall it, move it new hardware, run it on multiple boxes without having to get on the phone and beg someone for an additional license.
- Most of the applications I use daily come with the base install of Ubuntu (office apps, web browser, IM client, etc).
- When they don't, I can easily download and install full-scale robust applications safely from the internet in seconds.
- updating to the latest versions of software after reinstalling from disc can be done in one pass rather than having to launch an updater multiple times (eg, Windows Update).
- all of the software on the entire machine can be updated from one source all at once. No need to go to separate company websites and log in for updates.
- WoW runs fine under Ubuntu with WINE. I've been running it that way for a couple of years now.
- Since it can connect to a Microsoft VPN and run a remote desktop client, I can use Ubuntu at home to take over my Windows desktop at work, so I can work from home using Ubuntu.
- Privilege separation, combined with the fact that Ubuntu is not targeted by malware makers, makes it more secure to run than Windows. No need to pay ransom to Norton or McAfee to be safe on teh intraweb either.
- Ubuntu at this point seems to require about half the memory footprint of Vista. YMMV.
Since I don't run any very specific software that requires Windows, I can't imagine why I would want to.
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