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Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released
palegray.net writes "The latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released. Offering numerous enhancements for both desktop and server environments, this release includes notable features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubuntu One 'personal cloud,' and Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Please be sure to use a release mirror close to your geographic location to help reduce the stress on Ubuntu's primary servers; using BitTorrent for downloads can help alleviate the load even more. If your organization has adequate network and server resources, please consider hosting a mirror as well."
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I think you'll be better off with a complete reinstall. Especially if you have /home on a separate partition.
I mean seriously, how hard is it to go look at http://www.ubuntu.com/ to check?
All of the reviews of Windows 7 on NetBooks that I have seen so far have been positive about how well it performs on them. Microsoft actually targeted them because it knows it can't afford to make an OS which runs poorly on them or not at all.
spoken like a windows user.
And Windows costs no matter if you value your time or not. Even nicer!
Nah. People with those challenges tend to actually be far nicer than Microsoft!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I've been testing out the beta and I've been finding that things are generally better than in 9.04. Hopefully this release should be more stable for Intel graphics card users too (the major work Intel was doing reworking their stuff is calming down). However be warned if you use multiple monitors and compiz - xorg lockups will lie in store. Boot speed is improved too. The Moblin version of Ubuntu felt unfinished though and had lots of lockups for me (plus it is absolutely not geared for enterprise style networks - I couldn't get on my Uni's wifi because with Moblin because there's nowhere to enter a wifi username. Regular Ubuntu was no issue though). Obviously some people are going to be upset about Pulseaudio being there but you can see improvements there that the Linux desktop has been needing for some time (even though it's not there yet).
There are areas that don't seem quite polished enough and people will moan about the Linux apps look terrible and how open source people keep doing this on purpose. If I hadn't seen multimon stability issues I would have already have switched from my 8.04 install.
I don't understand why the Ubuntu team has never simplified the setup process for Samba. It is simple enough to share a folder with unlimited access, but as soon as you want to create users and passwords, it becomes rather complex. I've had to set it up a couple of times, and I never seem to get it to work quite right.
Many Ubuntu users are also going to be running a Windows machine on their local network. If the goal is to give them a positive experience with Linux, then setting up the connections on the local network should be brain-dead easy. Imagine sending a novice user to this page! They would soon be throwing away their Ubuntu disk and installing Windows.
Making an easy GUI for this configuration process shouldn't be that difficult. I hope that it will be addressed sometime soon.
I have to assume that there are some "secret" plans involving Ubuntu One that make a lot of sense (if you know them) and can actually explain why Ubuntu One exists in the first place. I've read through all the public documentation and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what is even remotely unique or noteworthy about the service.
Right now, it's attempting to be a Dropbox clone. However, it's not yet there and is clearly still in beta -- even though they have the same pricing structure as the (very mature) Dropbox. Their goal for the file synchronization service is to be as full-featured as Dropbox? But not more? Seriously, if your goal is to be as good as Dropbox, then why not just use Dropbox?
It's not even that "Ubuntu One is OSS and Dropbox is proprietary". Both services have OSS parts and proprietary parts.
Maybe, then, they are trying to be more of an online backup service, ala Mozy? Well... no. I can't find any evidence that they encrypt your data so it would be a bust as online backup.
So I don't get it. Why would anybody use (much less pay for) it when there are much more robust services already out there AND there's no indication that it'll actually be better than those services in any way. There must be some secret plans that I just don't know about.
Anybody feel like letting me know what I missed?
I can't seem to find torrents for the either 32 or 64 bit versions on the download page. Why hide the torrents, especially when traffic is so heavy right after release?
On a side note. It would be nice if the Ubuntu installer by default created a seperate /home partition. (or maybe they have in the last version or so, I haven't installed from scratch).
Uh, why? For most people, that's just a pain in the ass... suddenly you have to guess how much space you'll want in / and /home, and if you underestimate, you find yourself having to resize filesystems. And for those who care (such as yourself), you can easily set things up that way during the initial install.
Currently it doesn't matter too much because the main power consumption is in the display. But new display technology will change this.
Canonical's big opportunity is in mobile devices and in the Third World where power is expensive. Xubuntu is already a much nicer system than earlier versions of Windows.
Slightly OT, but the car industry has already bought into the logic. The new VW engine that replaces the 3 litre V6 is a 2-litre inline 4 that generates more power, is lighter and has 20% better fuel consumption. Nobody is saying "but my last Golf had a 3-litre V6, this is crap". Companies that focus on doing more with less are future proofing themselves.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Bugs like this always make me worry about Ubuntu's hard release dates. The Ubuntu One bug sounds like a pretty big problem. Would it have killed them to fix this problem and delay the release? I know slippery release dates cause other problems (DNF), but do you really want a major release to have serious problems like this?
Hey it is ubuntu. It is not supposed to work! :)
Seriously! When microsoft treated user like beta-tester we hated them. And now we praise ubuntu which does even worse...
I am very happy with my debian stable. I know there are no such critical bugs in it.
Why a separate /home? So that you can easily do a clean install of the next version from CD without blowing away all your data.
I learned that lesson several releases ago. I have 10GB / for the OS, and the rest in /home.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You know that Slashdot is going down hill when a perfectly reasonable comment asking for more information is replied to by three sarcastic comments about tubes, trucks, and pipes.
Ubuntu One looks like it uses other Ubuntu One users to store up to 2GB of data (hopefully securely) in a cloud-like state, e.g. with redundancy so that one failure doesn't cause you to lose those backups. I got that from a brief look at https://one.ubuntu.com/
Why? With disks sufficiently large these day, just allocate 10GB for Ubuntu and take the rest for /home.
And then you run out of that 10GB because you're working with large video files, or decide to rip your audio collection to disk. Hell, my /home was over 20GB before I cleared out some old cruft I no longer needed (just one directory, the result of a large .torrent, was over 5GB).
Meanwhile, you still haven't explained the advantages of putting /home on a separate partition.
If you don't trust that, simply use LVM. Really, this is childsplay.
What part of "average user" don't you understand? If you understand enough to use LVM, you understand enough to set up the partition table the way you see fit. Again, we're talking about Ubuntu's *default* configuration. And I've yet to see an argument for why the default installation should have /home on a separate partition.
This is a serious WTF. I understand their predisposition towards fixed release cycles, but we're talking about possible data loss here. Just about every standard I know considers bugs that cause data loss/corruption to be of critical severity, meaning that you don't ship with it. Files that are >512MB in size aren't even that rare today. They say writing to such files is suspected to result in data corruption, and I do not find it likely that the devs believe this to be anything less than a critical bug.
Funny, because I thought the premise was bottom-of-the-barrel computer users. Those don't have backups. Just saying...
Your solution is just as bad as mine for the computers users who are targeted by Ubuntu.
Funny, because I thought the premise was bottom-of-the-barrel computer users. Those don't have backups. Just saying...
And they also don't understand how to re-install Ubuntu and have it use their old /home partition (to do that, you have to use the advanced partitioning mode). Average users will just upgrade. And if they do that, then having /home on a separate partition presents absolutely zero advantages, while creating the pain of a more inflexible storage arrangement.
Ubuntu still needs to change a lot (scrap Upstart/clone FreeBSD init, get rid of DKMS, ideally get rid of crapt-get and clone ports, revert to OSS for sound, get rid of the insane scenario where GNOME is irremovably fused with virtually the entire rest of the system)
Or you could just run FreeBSD, rather than trying to turn Ubuntu into it...
If MS released WinFS in a situation where one user is reporting file corruption that doesn't appear to occur for anyone else? We'd be shocked at the improvement.
Ubuntu still needs to change a lot (scrap Upstart/clone FreeBSD init, get rid of DKMS, ideally get rid of crapt-get and clone ports, revert to OSS for sound, get rid of the insane scenario where GNOME is irremovably fused with virtually the entire rest of the system) in order to become a system I'd consider installing,
...or you could install another distro which satisfies your needs, instead of asking to completely change the aim and view of ubuntu. Let diversity reign in FOSS
I've done installs of Ubuntu on a virtual machines a couple of times but my initial experiences led me to stay away because I really like the development tools in Ubuntu and development really isn't Ubuntu's core strength - the end user desktop is or was. Installing dev tools felt like a right pain the behind and the fact that they didn't seem to allow let alone encourage custom kernel compilation put me right off. Fair enough I thought. I'm a geek I can stick with something else.
However pushing a release of an end user system like this that corrupts large files is just fucking moronic. I'm dumbfounded. Add allegations of pushing cloud computing shite to the mix and I'm giving Ubuntu a wide berth for now. This only confirms that i want to find another distro. Centos and Debian are looking to me like the leading distros for a geek to use, though I haven't checked out some of the others for a while. I don't hear as much about Mandrivel and SUSE these days.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'm just unsure why trying (and failing, for the most part) to be a half-assed Windows clone is such a great thing for Linux to do.
And I'm not sure why trying to emulate FreeBSD is "such a great thing for Linux to do". I like apt and it's killer dependency handling and associated, vast software repository. I like kernel modules and the fact that I don't have to build custom kernels anymore (I've done that, I've moved on). And PulseAudio. And faster boot times.
In short: I like the fact that Linux is growing past it's Unix roots and embracing good ideas from *everywhere*, as I realize that an operating system frozen in the 1980's isn't necessarily a good thing.
Linux was originally a UNIX clone, before Mark Shuttleworth got hold of it.
Holy shit, I can't even describe how much bullshit that is. Package managers? Kernel modules? Sound daemons? What, you think Shuttleworth invented those ideas? Good god, have you paid *any* attention to the last 15 years of development in the Linux world?
Ubuntu is the natural consequence of years of development as Linux has matured into an OS that consumers can actually use. If you don't like that, please, just go away and enjoy FreeBSD. It exists to do what you want. Leave Ubuntu, and Linux, the hell alone.
Canonical have had to do some fairly unnatural things to force Linux to resemble Windows to the degree that they have.
Total, utter bullshit. Canonical has done *nothing* that hadn't been pioneered by others. They just did a better job of refining it than anyone else.
What I want to know is why you're even participating in a discussion about Ubuntu, or Linux in general. Clearly you're a BSD fanboi... or perhaps I just fell for a troll?