Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.

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."

17 of 744 comments (clear)

  1. It says: 256MB RAM... by jkrise · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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....
    1. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by nomadic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.

      The first generation of netbooks ran linux. Just about everything after that ran windows. Sounds like linux will miss the bus.

    2. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by gad_zuki! · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I can barely run xubuntu on a machine with 256megs or ram let alone full ubuntu.

      >The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.

      Considering netbooks are shipping with 7 and ram costs less than shipping, I'll take the 2gig model, thanks. More ram for my apps.

    3. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Don't you mean front?
      All the "cool" people take the back seats.

    4. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by gad_zuki! · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I dont think Im doing anything wrong, we just have different usage patterns. First off, the original poster claimed full ubuntu ran on 256megs of RAM. No, thats the minimum requirement for the standard installer. If you have a machine with less than that you need an alternate install disk. Or you do what I do: use xubuntu. I cant imagine running full ubuntu on less than 1gig.

      My xubuntu machine barely runs at 256, which I think is a fair assessment. It boots, runs fine, but when I load up firefox, open a bunch of tabs, play some music, run a mail client, etc then it just runs out of RAM. I dont see its ram usage being much better than 2000 or even XP, but I have to deal with a less impressive and featured GUI.

      That said, I am very impressed by xubuntu. Network manager could use some work. I usually just remove it and deal with IP addresses the old fashioned way. I think it hurts the linux community to spread lies about ram. Linux isnt magic. If you want to run a distro thats similar to the bells and whistles of OSX or Win7 then youre going to have to use a similar amount of RAM. Youre not getting away with using 1/4 the ram without giving up gnome.

    5. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by dissy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So if they aim for being usable on 256mb of ram, just imagine how much faster than that it would run on 1gb!

      When system X runs on 256mb as fast as system Y runs in 1gb ram, it is usually a given that system X will FAR outperform system Y on the same 1gb system.

      Whats not to like?

    6. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by wall0159 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That sounds fair, but I think we should be clear then that it's not xubuntu that's using your RAM, but rather the apps you're running. As I said in my other post, I've set my parents up with a machine with only 96 MB RAM, but they're using claw email client and epiphany (I think, they're _definitely_ not using firefox!), and their usage is basic.

      I agree though - Linux isn't magic, and if you want to run a machine with little RAM you'll need to work within that constraint. Having said that, I don't know which other modern OS they could run with so little RAM.

    7. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by jkrise · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Considering netbooks are shipping with 7 and ram costs less than shipping

      Real Netbooks are devices like the SmartQ5 and the SmartQ7 which I have got evaluation pieces from China for about $170 a piece. These devices contain the ARM-11 series processor with 256MB of RAM and 1GB of storage.

      Windows7 requires regular disk drives and that makes it a mini-Notebook; not a Netbook.

      Basically Microsoft took the Netbook, added a disk and forced it onto the market through big-name h/w vendors. This will not work with the ARM-range of Netbooks on which Windows will not run; but Maemo, Ubuntu, Fedora etc run decently enough.

      --
      If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
    8. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by AdamWill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Correct! Also why have OSes gotten so large they required DVDs! I remember being able to install 3.11 for workgroups off a series of floppies, why can't we go back to that?!"

      Because...then we'd be running Windows 3.11?

      *shudders*

    9. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The first generation of netbooks ran linux. Just about everything after that ran windows. Sounds like linux will miss the bus.

      No. Microsoft got on the bus and then forced the bus company to turn the bus into a jumbo jet so that Microsoft's fat ass could fit in the seats.

      --
      Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
    10. Re:It says: 256MB RAM... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Insightful

      actually, I disagree with that statement. Imagine a world where every app required 1Gb RAM to run acceptably (Office 2010 anyone?). What you will see is not an app that runs slow if you give it less and faster if you give it more, but an app that runs slowly no matter how much you give it.

      Think of that 1Gb, how long does it take to get that off disk and into RAM? Or, if the ram usage is calculated/generated and the disk image is tiny, how long does it take to fill it up with what ever it is doing?

      that said, once you have the app that has all that RAM used, how much of it will fit into the CPU caches? How much time will be spent shifting data from RAM to L3 to L2 to L1 caches - and if the CPU is waiting for data to be updated in its cache, its certainly not running at those multi-gigahertz speeds, you'd be better off with an old 200 Mhz P3 and a gigabyte of L1 cache!

      Of course, we wont even go into the time it takes if you end up swapping!

      It doesn't matter if an app used 64k or 1Mb - both those numbers are still quite small, small enough not to make a difference that you'd notice. But when the memory usage creeps up to tremendous levels, you know its going to run like a dog. 200Mb plus another 200Mb swapped out is normal for some apps. Guess how well they run?

      In some cases I wouldn't be worried about an app that did use a lot of memory, if its used for data structures or cached data, but these slow apps seem to be built on bloated frameworks that make them use masses of ram just to do nothing (well, just to make a lazy programmer's life a little bit easier)

      An app that requires 256MB will always run faster than one that takes 1Gb, even if you have a machine with 100Gb RAM. RAM may be cheap but I/O bandwidth is not.

      RAM is meant to be used, but I'd like that to be used by the OS to cache the disk, or whatever it likes, not to have all that gobbled up by apps that leave the OS with little left over to cache with.

  2. Samba? by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Ubuntu One: Secret Plans? by Kurt+Granroth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  4. Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T by Abcd1234 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T by metamatic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  6. Re:Personal Cloud... by Sancho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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/

  7. Re:Canonical does something right for a change by Abcd1234 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...