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Our Blogs Open Sauce Ubuntu: next release will be the critical one
Our Blogs Open Sauce Ubuntu: next release will be the critical one | Ubuntu: next release will be the critical one |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 07 March 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 But then in the world of free and open source software, the spirit in which one does something is as important as keeping to the letter of the law. There is a measure of jealousy at the success which Ubuntu has achieved; there is a degree of anger too, much of it justified. As Rudyard Kipling once said, east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Alpha 5, the last release of Hardy Heron which emerged on February 21 and which I've been experimenting with since then, shows some interesting features. For once, the plain brown desktop is gone and there is a graphic which gives it character - fittingly of a heron. (A beta version of Hardy Heron should be out on March 20.) There has been movement on other fronts too - the kernel is the 2.6.24 version, the X.org supplied is 7.3 and the audio system uses PulseAudio. Firefox beta 3 is included and, presumably, the finished version of this Firefox release will be included on April 24. There are some neat changes in Firefox - two which I noticed are the non-intrusive way in which one can now add extensions and the removal of the nag screen which asks whether a password for a particular site should be saved or not. There is a noticeable increase in responsiveness. Other changes include a change from GNOME's BitTorrent client (which really sucked) to Transmission and the debut of new CD burning software called Brasero. (k3b, the king of all CD burning software packages, be they proprietary or FOSS, is in the Kubuntu release.) But the main feature which marks this out as the release on which Shuttleworth is probably betting the house is Wubi, which allows one to install Ubuntu from within Windows. A number of distributions, Ubuntu included, have offered the option of having a look at the goods on display via a live CD; however, performance is so much superior when the operating system is installed on a hard drive. Using Wubi, Ubuntu gets installed in a directory on the Windows tree. (Slackware offered something similar in version 7.1; there was one called ZipSlack (a text-based system which is still available for download)and a second called BigSlack (a full graphical system which seems to have been discontinued), I recall). |
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