An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary [LWN.net]

January 26, 2005

This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar

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.

(Log in to post comments)

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 27, 2005 10:34 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

Why does every distribution need to develop its own "cute" terminology, whose main feature seem to be that it makes everything significantly harder to understand for people who aren't "insiders".

Try asking your mother (or father) what he would think was the most bleeding-edge version choosen from "stable", "unstable" and "testing". Everyone will get that "stable" is the most dependable version, but it's a toss-up between unstable and testing.

What's wrong with refering to unsupported or unofficial software as such rather than as "universe" ? (how many would understand the latter to mean the former without an explanation?)

What is more understandable and/or inituitive for a non-insider: that we need to "install" a program before we can use it, or that the program needs to be "emerged".

What exactly is the benefit of refering to something as "Array3" instead of just using the normal words that people will understand *without* an explanation ? (namely alpha, beta or stable)

Being different just for the sake of being different is not a good idea. It increases the learning-curve, makes aquired skills less transferable than they'd otherwise be and gains you nothing whatsoever other than a sense of being a "cool insider" that knows all the spesific terminology.

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 27, 2005 22:04 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link]

You don't think the "unofficial" label might scare people off from installing perfectly functional software? I can buy "after-market" fog lights for my car, which of course wouldn't be covered by my car manufacturer's warranty or replaced by the dealer if they break, but how many people would buy "unofficial, non-warranty" fog lights?

Terminology has meanings that are much deeper than we intend and are always somewhat different to different people. Folks coming from Windows often think of "installing" to mean "running an opaque executable from a vendor that may overwrite system settings, remove files that other applications depend on, store new files in hidden locations, and possibly covertly install spyware or even viruses, but hopefully at the end the desired application will function (after the requisite reboot)." Whereas installing a new package in most Linux distributions is much more mundane, and merely overlays a set of new files in a safe manner onto an existing system. The process is even quite easily reversible, unlike most software installations on Windows.

I agree that "Array-3" is probably unnecessary, but using new terms when the terms from similar fields don't fit quite right is a common and accepted practice.

On creating new terminology

Posted Jan 27, 2005 22:04 UTC (Thu) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

I would think that the reason is that one project don't want to contaminate their specific meaning of a word with possible alternative interpretations in other projects.

For example, debian stable is stable only in the sense of that the packages are not changing much. Still, some of the software included in debian stable can be quite unstable, even to the point that they in the long run are unusable. So, stable from administration perspective does not have to imply stable from end user perspective.

If a project instead invents a new terminology, there is little need for consideration on how other projects previously have used it.

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 27, 2005 14:33 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

Maybe it's just that your criteria are a bit skewed by your personal preferences and experience?

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 27, 2005 15:06 UTC (Thu) by PhilHannent (guest, #1241) [Link]

I am in agreement with you here.

I think that it would be nice to have some sort of benchmark test that could be run. I am not talking about a benchmark that would test the hardware performance but usability tests such as:

1, If installing packages has got easier (How long it takes 3 different people to install a package - not including download time)
2, Devices detection improved
3, Documentation completeness
4, Number of reboots to achieve a desired setup and if the GUI or command line was required

If all distributions were held to a common test people could quantify a distribution and if something is different between tests a reporter has something to investigate.

On the other hand its a cost overhead that lwn might not be able to bear.

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 30, 2005 6:06 UTC (Sun) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

I have been hearing comments floating around that the Ubuntu repositories are not very complete, that users have had to mix in vanilla Debian packages to get certain apps running. Is there truth to this?

Also, not a smarmy comment but I am wondering what motivation there is as a happy FC3 user for me to switch. What aspects of FC3 do users feel are deficient which are fixed by Ubuntu?

I also have some issues with the long-term viability of the project. How does Canonical intend to stay afloat? I know their founder is insanely rich, but he is not insanely stupid. If Canonical is a money pit he will cut bait...my observations are that rich-guy ego vanity projects tend to have short lifespans. Watch how fast all of the rich-guy spaceship companies (see firms opened by Bezos, Musk, Carmack) fold in the next couple of years once the money really starts draining with nothing interesting happening. On the other hand, I have no doubts that RedHat will continue to fund and derive utility from Fedora...it is after all their beta test platform.

I don't make these statements as a Fedora booster, I am ready to switch to Ubuntu if someone can tell me why.

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 30, 2005 6:25 UTC (Sun) by niran (guest, #27560) [Link]

By default, Ubuntu only enables a repository of software that they will support. The rest of the packages are in the "universe" repository, which is a check box away in Synaptic. I think universe contains everything in sid and then some, but I might be wrong.

As for switching to it from FC3, I don't really see an incentive to. I'm a fan of .deb based distros, so that's what drove me to Ubuntu. For Hoary, it seems like the developers have taken in interest in Mono and Gtk# apps, so it'll be easy to install Beagle, Muine and Tomboy, the latter two of which I can't live without. Other than that, it all seems the same to me with different package management slapped on.

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Jan 31, 2005 23:15 UTC (Mon) by freeid (guest, #22401) [Link]

I have nothing against Red Hat or Fedora but you should go into using their distribution with your eyes wide open. Ubuntu like Debian is a community distribution. Fedora on the other hand is a distribution to get end-users to participate in free QA for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The features included and direction of the Fedora project are in direct relation to the interests of Red Hat and the features included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux software. This is not a community distribution. You are only able to participate as free QA, not as a developer, maintainer, or committee member.

Debian and Ubuntu in this case allows the community to decide the direction and focus of the development of their distribution and is not using a large group of individuals to replace a missing QA department within the Red Hat corporation in Massachusetts.

An Early Look at Ubuntu Hoary

Posted Feb 2, 2005 4:09 UTC (Wed) by mdz@debian.org (subscriber, #14112) [Link]

The Ubuntu archive contains all of the packages that Debian's archive does, plus more.