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An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

After the highly successful launch of Ubuntu Linux last October, all eyes are now on the next release - version 5.04 and code name "Hoary". What can we look forward to? Quite a bit: GNOME 2.10, OpenOffice.org 2.0 (or, at the very least, a beta version of the new package in one of the unsupported repositories), Unicode encoding throughout all applications, better package management with newly introduced update-manager and upgrade-notifier, as well as a set of new Ubuntu live CDs - not only for the i386 architecture, but also for AMD64, IA64 and PPC. With all these ambitious features, Ubuntu is quickly becoming a force to reckon with in the Linux world.

We decided to take an early look at the current state of development at Ubuntu by downloading and installing the Ubuntu "Hoary" Array-3 CD for AMD64. In the Ubuntu terminology, Array-3 is something that other distributions might call Alpha-3; in other words, a highly experimental release. Nevertheless, the developers asserted that the the package is reasonably free of showstopper bugs. We installed it on a system with the following specifications: AMD64 3500+ processor (2.2GHz), K8N Neo2 (Socket939) mainboard from Micro-Star International, 2 GB of DDR SDRAM, 2 x 120 GB Maxtor hard disks, Plextor PX-712A DVD/CD rewritable drive, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics card, and a standard 19 inch LCD monitor from Mozo International.

As far as the system installer is concerned, not much has changed since "Warty", Ubuntu's current stable release. The installer is still text-mode, a slightly modified Debian installer that will ship with the upcoming Debian 3.1. Some of the modules have been moved around; for example the screens that prompt users to configure the time zone and setup a user account now appear just after the base system has been installed and before the user is prompted to reboot. Additional packages are installed after the reboot and this is where we ran into some troubles with dependency issues and were promptly dropped into aptitude, a text-mode package manager. Rather than fiddling around in what we thought was an archaic and unintuitive user interface, we quit aptitude and used the command line to "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop", which did the work of installing a graphical desktop with the latest development release of GNOME.

GNOME is the heart of the Ubuntu desktop, and the only supported graphical environment in this distribution. There has been much enthusiasm for the recent GNOME releases, especially since "spatial mode" in Nautilus was accepted as a feature, rather than a bug. With its clean desktop, excellent internationalization, and less complex (compared to KDE) configuration options, GNOME, now backed by Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu, has matured into a worthy competitor to KDE which, at one point, seemed to be winning the desktop battle. The first beta of GNOME 2.10 (developer version 2.9.90) was released earlier this week and packages are already available in the main repository of the Ubuntu development branch. There will be one more beta, followed by a quick release candidate, before the final release of GNOME 2.10 expected on March 9th, 2005.

What's new in GNOME 2.10? There aren't any real groundbreaking new features, but rather many small improvements that will make our computing lives a little easier. Some applications have been given additional functionalities; as an example, Yelp, the GNOME help browser now supports HTML help (powered by the Gecko rendering engine), man pages and GNU info. Novell Evolution (currently broken on Hoary) has seen many interesting changes with the addition of the "eplugin", an extensible plugin manager for adding extra functionality to the groupware client. The GNOME System Tools package has also been getting much attention lately and a new module for configuring network interfaces and another one for disk management will be making their appearances in GNOME 2.10, or possibly the following release. Many new applets, panel and applet transparency, improved user interfaces for configuring various aspects of the GNOME desktop, and several newly proposed applications to be officially included in GNOME (e.g. Totem, Sound Juicer, Goobox) - all these seeming small but highly effective innovations will complement the already excellent desktop suite.

We would have loved to test the current beta release of OpenOffice.org 2.0, but despite its presence in the "universe" (i.e. unsupported) directory on the Ubuntu download servers, it turned out to be not installable. Also, there are still no native 64-bit packages for OpenOffice.org, so we were left with version 1.1.3, a 32-bit application making use of the ia32-lib compatibility libraries stored in the /lib32 directory. Had we chosen not to install OpenOffice.org on the system, we would have ended up with a pure 64-bit system, with all applications compiled and optimized for the AMD64 processor.

We have already mentioned the Ubuntu live CDs, which represent another interesting aspect of this distribution. These live CDs are now built by the maintainers of Gnoppix, a project that was originally an attempt to develop a Knoppix-like distribution for GNOME users. The latest beta builds of Gnoppix (version 0.9.3) are shaping up to be truly impressive products; they serve not just as live CDs, but also as full installation CDs, depending on the selection one makes in the main menu. It is not quite clear whether these CDs will become the primary means of installing Ubuntu Linux, but it is certainly an attractive idea - this way, users would only need to commit a hard disk partition to the operating system after they have ascertained that the product meet their needs. Based on discussions on Ubuntu forums, these live CDs reportedly work well on Apple hardware, which makes Gnoppix one of the first Linux live CDs available for the Macintosh (the developers at ROCK Linux have also built a full bootable live CD for the Mac).

Although the current alpha version of Ubuntu Linux comes with its fair share of bugs, the developers seem to be on the right track to produce another memorable release in April this year. If you'd like to join the legions of satisfied Ubuntu users, you might consider placing an order for the new Hoary CDs; they ship free of charge - perhaps contrary to any business sense, but certainly true to the spirit of Ubuntu's ideals of humanity and sharing. And that's what Free Software is about.

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Distribution News

Slackware 10.1 beta 1

Patrick Volkerding has sent out a Slackware changelog notice decreeing the first 10.1 beta. There is also a fairly detailed update on his ongoing health issues; click below for the full story.

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Mandrakelinux 10.2 beta

The first beta for Mandrakelinux v10.2 has been released. The Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta information page is the place to go to find out more.

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Debian GNU/Linux

Here's the latest Sarge status report with a look at the remaining bugs and other issues. "After the expected slide in activity and backslide in bug count over the holidays, the release team has gotten an aggressive start on the new year, starting off with the arrival of first a new gcc-3.3 (for some ia64 fixes) and then KDE3.3 in testing, allowing us to clear a hefty chunk of release-critical bugs (including numerous security bugs) from the list for sarge."

The debian-volatile project aims to provide reliables updates for stable systems on fast moving targets such as spam filtering and virus scanning. Here's the latest status report for the debian-volatile project.

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Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu has announced that Array CD 3 is ready. This is the third in a series of milestone CD images, released when they're known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD-build or installer bugs, while representing very current snapshots of Hoary. "Pre-release versions of Hoary are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional breakage. They *are* recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs."

The latest Ubuntu Community Council meeting was held on January 25, 2005. As usual, Mako has made available both the Summary and the full log. The two big issues discussed at the meeting were: changes to the processes through which people can become new members or new maintainers and the idea of instituting reply-to headers for the Ubuntu users mailing list.

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Slackware talk at FOSDEM

There's an announcement at Slackware.com that Stuart Winter, "the Slackware Packaging Expert", will be giving a talk on the Slackware packaging system at FOSDEM 2005.

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Fedora and Xen: A Quick Start Guide

Xen is now available from the Fedora development repository. "We're following the -unstable Xen tree at the moment which does occasionally lead to things being broken but also lets us track a lot of the more interesting work going on there. Since setting up to run Xen isn't entirely straight-forward, here's a run-through of what should work for setting up a single Xen guest running the Fedora development tree." You can read the guide by clicking below, or visit the FedoraXenQuickStart guide at its new wiki page.

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Fedora Core updates

FC3 updates cups-1.1.22-0.rc1.8.4 (fixes CAN-2005-0064), alsa-lib-1.0.6-7.FC3 (new version fixes bugs), kernel-utils (update microcode_ctl to 1.11), pam-0.77-66.2 (bug fixes), grep-2.5.1-31.4 (fixes a small regression in handling multibyte input), hal (new upstream release fixes bugs), im-sdk-12.1-10.FC3 (bug fix update), gphoto2-2.1.5-1.1 (version upgrade to 2.1.5), apr-0.9.4-24.2 (rebuild to fix bundled libtool), hal-0.4.7-1.FC3 (new upstream release), gaim-1.1.2-0.FC3 (fixes a great many bugs), tetex-2.0.2-21.3 (fixes xpdf buffer overflow CAN-2005-0064).

FC2 updates cups-1.1.20-11.10 (fixes CAN-2005-0064), gaim-1.1.2-0.FC2 (fixes a great many bugs), tetex-2.0.2-14FC2.2 (fixes xpdf buffer overflow CAN-2005-0064).

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Mandrakelinux MDKA-2005:004

Mandrakelinux has updated php packages with bug fixes.

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New Distributions

EzPlanet One Linux

EzPlanet One Linux is a Linux distribution tuned for Enterprise solutions. EzPlanet One integrates advanced technologies, flexibility, quality and security. Built with the Enterprise in mind, it features also several tools for the Professionals and Individual users, that make its use more fun. EzPlanet One version 2.0 was released January 2005.

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Distribution Newsletters

Debian Weekly News

Here's the Debian Weekly News for January 25, 2005. This week you can read about experimental packages of Exim4 linked against db4.2, a guideline on using the new debian-installer, a Sarge release progress update, a status update for volatile archive, and several other topics.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of January 24, 2005 is out. This week's topics include OpenSolaris and Portage support, new kernel profiles for 2005.0, Genesi Open Desktop Workstation with Gentoo pre-installed, Gentoo first to run on Mac Mini, and more.

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Ubuntu Traffic #17

The 17th issue of Ubuntu Traffic is out. The author is still working to catch up to 2005; this issue covers the second week of the Mataró conference, with looks at Rosetta, accessibility, security, Python, and more.

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DistroWatch Weekly Issue 84

The DistroWatch Weekly for January 24, 2005 is out. "Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! We comment on why we believe that there is no reason to worry about the future of Slackware Linux, reveal a new RPM package resource for SUSE users, and point out a fresh controversy occupying some of the Debian developers - XFree86 versus X.Org. Also, don't miss the newly released Linux+ Live DVD and a new distribution for Farsi (Persian) speakers - Parsix GNU/Linux. Enjoy!"

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Minor distribution updates

Arch Linux 0.7 released

Arch Linux 0.7 has been released. Information on changes is relatively sparse, but this changelog shows improved 2.6 support, udev, X.Org, and more. (Thanks to Xavier de Laboure).

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Gnoppix

Gnoppix has released GNOPPIX Developer version 0.9.3b3 Hoary for PowerPC, AMD64 and Intel i386 Platforms. This version comes with Gnome 2.9.3 and Xorg.

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Openwall GNU/Linux

Openwall GNU/Linux has released a patched Linux 2.4.29-ow1 which fixes several recent vulnerabilities. The Openwall (Owl) distribution now uses that kernel and moves to GCC 3.4.3 and glibc 2.3.3+.

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tinysofa

tinysofa classic server 1.1 Update 3 (Rio) is now generally available. Take a look at the change log for details.

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Newsletters and articles of interest

The Month in BSD: December 2004 (O'ReillyNet)

O'ReillyNet summarizes BSD news. "OpenBSD switches to GCC 3, NetBSD releases 2.0, FreeBSD meets its donation mark, and DragonFly BSD starts to implement journaling. Sam Smith reports the BSD news for December 2004."

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Distribution reviews

Yoper: A next-generation OS? (LinuxTimes)

LinuxTimes reviews the Yoper Operating System (YOS) "Yoper Operating System (YOS), or Yoper GNU/Linux if you prefer, was an eye-opener even for someone who has used over fifty GNU/Linux distributions. Everything just seemed to work, and it was as simple as that. Could this be the answer to the Microsoft problem?"

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My workstation OS: Ubuntu (NewsForge)

Here's a mini review of Ubuntu Linux, on NewsForge. "I've found a Linux distribution that meets my criteria for an ideal system. Ubuntu Linux is fast. It has simple software updating and installation through Debian's Synaptic package manager. All of my removable media works automagically. It detected all of my hardware. And above all, it has a simple, clean, elegant interface that I love."

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VidaLinux 1.1 -- Gentoo Done Right (Mad Penguin)

Mad Penguin takes a look at VidaLinux 1.1. "So we've established that VidaLinux is based on Gentoo right? It is. Isn't Gentoo just Gentoo either way you cut it? Well, not really. What sets VidaLinux apart from its parent is actually twofold. The first thing you'll notice is that it uses Red Hat's Anaconda installer. With VidaLinux there is no need to print out a tens of pages of documentation to install your system via the command line interface. Everything is done using the graphical Anaconda interface. This provides a huge benefit to those who might have been intimidated by Gentoo Linux but want to give it a shot."

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