Slashdot Mirror
Canonical To Release Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS 'Xenial Xerus' Tomorrow (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical announced today that it will be releasing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Thursday, April 21. The sixth major release of Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) features the new 'snap' package format and LXD pure-container hypervisor. "The addition of 'snaps' for faster and simpler updates, and the LXD container hypervisor for ultra-fast and ultra-dense cloud computing demonstrate a commitment to customer needs that sets Ubuntu apart as the platform for innovation and scale," said Dustin Kirkland who leads platform strategy at Canonical. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS introduces a new application format, the 'snap', which can be installed alongside traditional deb packages. The snap format is much easier to secure and much easier to produce, and offers operational benefits for organizations managing many Ubuntu devices, which will bring more robust updates and more secure applications across all form factors from phone to cloud.
I may be asking too much here, but I would love to know what people think of 16.04 from a real-world, practical perspective. What can you do with it that you couldn't with previous versions? What, in your opinion, has improved? Any issues? For example, I haven't been keeping a close eye, so this is the first time I've heard of this new snap system. Is it any good?
But I suspect the forum will just be filled with the usual "systemd sux!" and "pulseaudio sux" and "I can't stand Unity, and Shuttleworth is an asshole, use linux mint or instead!"
But here's hoping for a civil discussion for once.
Based on experience, Ubuntu will be released at the last possible moment on April 21st for the last people on Earth (Literally!) to still be in April 21st. It'll be available for most people on the 22nd I'm sure.
when it circles around, again, I think they should consider 'boaty mcboatface'. I've heard the name is available...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It includes ZFS as a standard supported file system. That's the most interesting new feature from my perspective.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
An AC said: "Which could get Canonical into hot water with the GPL."
Whether or not this is a licence violation depends on Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation. They are the ones that set the terms for how Linux is licensed. Under U.S. law at least, it's the copyright owner's intent that matters, and not some third party interpretation interpretation of the licence text.
Torvalds has previously stated that a kernel module can't violate the kernel licence agreement unless it is a derivative work of the kernel (and the module licence violates the GPL). At the very least, it needs to have been designed with knowledge of the Linux internals. Since ZFS was developed independent of Linux, it seems unlikely that The Linux Foundation will be suing Canonical.
If you want to thoroughly understand the issues, you could read Eben Moglen's opinion (he's the lawyer behind the GPL 3): https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl.html
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
I use MySQL on Debian - have zero problems with systemd -- could it be your chair?
It took me about a day to get used to systemd - I didn't ask for the change - but it seems to be somewhat helpful in the long run. Mostly invisible on the servers I run - just don't notice the difference. Worst feature of systemd? This command is too long to type when I'm sleepy:
# systemctl list-unit-files --type=service
Needs an alias.
For the old farts that can't adopt ( I'm 61 - so you must really be old ) - there is help:
https://wiki.xtronics.com/inde...
I don't see what all the Ubuntu hate is about these days.
This is normal. Ubuntu was exciting, a Linux distro that was suitable for the desktop. They'd even mail out free disks for you to distribute to friends and family, spreading the Good News, the gospel of Linus. Slashdot loved it. It was easy enough for your grandmother to use, painless to setup, and required very little maintenance. Everyone was happy.
Then, it became popular. It was easy to find answers to questions, support, drivers, whatever you needed.
Slashdot hates popular things -- especially popular things that are easy to use and support. If you want to be cool, be intentionally obtuse. Slack, Arch, and Gentoo are a safe bet for now.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Okay, so software libraries were invented to have a standard place to put shared, common code, which allows bug fixes and so on to be applied in one place.
And so stuff like "snap" packages are much less annoying, because every app gets it's own different versions of the libraries.
But this means that if, for example, you try to fix a bug by updating a library, the snap package that uses that library won't get the fix, because it's go it's own variant of the library.
And to actually fix a bug in a library, you need to update the version embedded in each snap package...
(Someone please tell me this is wrong.)
Wait... you installed a completely different distribution because you didn't like Unity? You didn't just sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop or xubuntu-desktop or whatever?
Having one central version and each app having its version both have pros and cons. The pros for each are both good, so the pendulum keeps swinging back and fourth. It will continue to do so until someone makes the effort to get both supported in an elegant way where everything is shared by default but programs with issues can be easily and automatically converted to the other way.
From a developer's perspective, if your source control tree doesn't include every library you're using you're doing it wrong. Anyone should be able to checkout your code and run a single command to do a build. The only dependency should be the build tool (even better if there aren't any dependencies).
From a system admin's perspective, trying to manage every program's libraries is a nightmare and wastes disk space.
People who don't understand the pros and cons keep building system ontop of system to switch their current method to the one. They don't bother to consider why their current exists the way it does and instead only look at the pros of the new system. "I'm smarter than the guy before me, so we must do it this 'new' way." Most developers have no respect for current designs and know nothing about how we got there. For instance, almost no software follows the original OOP design. What people program now is a bastardization of the original principles. How is OOP on topic? The original OO design requires programs to include their own copies of libraries.
Mangy Manx