Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon coming
The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I’ve installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what’s what and so far haven’t had much time to play around. I seem to recall the localization question being new in the installer, but then it’s been a while since I used the ubiquity installer (used the alternative install to setup software raid based systems.) But… other than that I haven’t poked around with it much. However, I have read that the 8.04 (April 2008) release will be codenamed Hardy Heron and will be a long term service (LTS) version. I’m MORE interested in that given that I have one server running the previous LTS release 6.06 dapper drake. I’ll be interested in upgrading it to a newer LTS EVENTUALLY, but I don’t know if I’ll jump for the upcoming April release or wait… but I did find some promising instructions for upgrading to Fiesty (7.04). It’s good to see that kind of detailed how-to as opposed to just an upgrade option on the cd so you can do it from within the OS.
It sounds as though sequential upgrades are supported – 6.06 -> 6.10 ->7.04->7.10-8.04 os it would take several steps to get there, but might be worthwhile…
On the desktop I’m still teetering towards moving to Kubuntu in place of Mandriva. I’m using Mandriva 2006 on the desktop, but…. I’ve got Kubuntu 7.04 on a 500mhz laptop. I’ve found that although I learned URPMI first and for quite a while was more fond of it, apt-get has won me over in some respects – apt-get is SO much quicker than urpmi (even though I’m running apt-get ona 500mhz/256mb pipsqueak compared to my 2ghz 64bit amd…. that’s running urpmi.) Software updates are much more easily available for ubuntu systems. The adept-updater is so seemless into the desktop (whereas in Mandriva you do have to subscribe for the automatic gui that notifies of updates…). I can’t count how many programs I’ve run across that I wanted to try that had debian AND ubuntu packages, but for mandriva I went hunting for the srpm to rebuild. Now, I’m good at rebuilding srpms for my own machine, (I’ve had lot’s of practice) but… every now and then I run into one that has several dependencies which ALSO aren’t available for 2006 of Mandriva and I have to go search and rebuild those too… In other words, there are lots of advantages to using a more popular distribution – prebuilt binaries are more prevalent.
I don’t know the debian process for building a deb as well as building rpms – I’ve done it once or twice, but I know the mandriva process reflexively from working with it so much. The long and short of it is that I think next time I have a few days of little to do I may find myself moving the primary desktop to ubuntu. Of course, I’ll likely keep a Mandriva vm around to play with (and recompile software on…) I’ve just found ubuntu to be a bit more elegant. Admittedly I haven’t tried out Mandriva 2007 or the upcoming 2008 release, but I would have just as much upheaval doing that as going to ubuntu would cause. (I guess I could edit the urpmi sources to be 2007 sources and do a package upgrade /etc /etc. I’ve done that before but don’t know how well that’s supported.) For all the pokiness of urpmi it makes me cringe to think about starting that.