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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Ubuntu Linux 8: Is the heron hardier?
The Linux distillery Ubuntu Linux 8: Is the heron hardier? | Ubuntu Linux 8: Is the heron hardier? |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 31 March 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Despite this amazing bit of tech trivia, the question on most people’s lips are “Will my wireless card finally work?” along with “What’s new?” and “Is it worthwhile upgrading?” I’ll come to these in just a moment. First, one important thing must be mentioned. Gutsy Gibbon promoted the latest and greatest in Linux technology. It showed off a sporty new facade, compiled together loads of device drivers, and was in general aimed at having a terrific feature set and a greatly improved user experience in general. By contrast, Hardy Heron has been designated as one of Ubuntu’s periodic Long Term Support – or LTS – releases, for which the company commits itself to providing three years desktop support and five years server support. This means that Hardy Heron isn’t going to go anywhere soon; it’s here for the long haul. This invariably means the designers have focused less on putting brand new stuff in but rather more stability, more robustness and more reliability. This should please those who found Gutsy Gibbon disappointing – and indeed, Gutsy was an experimental version of Ubuntu. It’s experimental nature did give a fresh look but also meant it didn’t end up being capable of providing a stable and robust experience to all people on all systems. To these users, Hardy Heron will hopefully prove more, well, hardy. By being named as an LTS release I’m expecting it to come with high reliability built in and much less in the way of new, unproven, untested items. Hardy Heron will be released this month, April 2008, but you can get your hands on the pre-release beta. If you’re a Gutsy Gibbon user, run update-manager –d from a command line. Otherwise – or, if you sensibly don’t want to trash a working system with beta code – you can download an ISO image from http://www.ubuntu.com/testing. At the time of writing only the first beta is available, with a release date of 20th March, 2008. Here’s what it’s like so far. Please read on to find out what you can expect in this exciting new version of what is widely regarded as the most popular modern Linux distro available. CONTINUED |
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