Ubuntu to get Edgy [LWN.net]

Now that the Dapper beta freeze has begun, it is time to start thinking about what comes next. According to the Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu will get Edgy.

The Dapper Drake, due out June 1st, will be supported for five years. It will still be nice and fresh, if a bit staid and stable for those who need stability. It is the perfect time to launch the Edgy Eft, the cutting edge, youthful newt of a distribution. Edgy is ready to take risks and explore new territory, even if that means getting a little bloody. Look for Xen, Xgl/AIGLX, SELinux and other new technologies to show up in Edgy.

Now is the time to get your "out there" ideas in. The Launchpad spec tracker is where this flood of new technology will be managed. The list is already full of ideas like Beagle integration, better Bluetooth support, Debian patch feeding, cluster installation management, embedded Ubuntu, thin clients and much more. What would you like to see in Edgy?

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Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 20, 2006 10:47 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

Eft ... now that's what I call obscure. I had to look it up. From dictionary.com,

An immature newt, especially the reddish-orange terrestrial form of a North American species, Notophthalmus viridescens.

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 20, 2006 13:17 UTC (Thu) by jsatchell (subscriber, #6236) [Link]

I have also heard the word Eft used, by a wildlife professional, of the immature forms of the three UK newt species, the Smooth Newt (Triturus vulgaris), the Palmate Newt (Triturus helveticus) and the Great Crested Newt (Triturus cristatus).

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 21, 2006 13:08 UTC (Fri) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

If anyone knows a collective noun for efts, or indeed for newts, that we can use for our alpha CD releases, I'd be very grateful to hear about it ...

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 22, 2006 13:10 UTC (Sat) by jbailey (subscriber, #16890) [Link]

*lol* I wonder if Mark is now choosing these by "How to make Colin's naming job harder?"

But how 'bout this:

"Newts have the ability to regenerate limbs, eyes and spinal cords." - wikipedia.

Perhaps the snapshot releases can be done like a game of hangman - name one after each regenerated limb. ;)

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 21, 2006 22:02 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

That's already in Dapper. Just use Network Manager. There are a few warts but overall it works quite well.

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 22, 2006 9:55 UTC (Sat) by keybuk (subscriber, #18473) [Link]

wpasupplicant is in the dapper minimal seed, just add the network details to /etc/network/interfaces, e.g.

iface eth1 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid linksys
wpa-psk ...

Alternatively install network-manager-gnome (or -kde) to have it managed for you

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 24, 2006 14:22 UTC (Mon) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763) [Link]

Yep - NetworkManager is in Universe - shame it wasn't quite mature enough to be in the core release. But it works for me. I'll be honest, I never got WPA to work before, bit with NM, it's finally easier than Window$.

Process management

Posted Apr 23, 2006 20:51 UTC (Sun) by rovfrukt (guest, #6353) [Link]

I would like to be able to go into the gnome-system-monitor, right click a process and choose a processor that it will be locked to. Further more, and much more important, I would like to be able to likewise choke a process at certain IO-rates, CPU-rates and page cache levels. All within a slick gnome-ui ofcourse.

I have a more or less silent system, when the CPU use is up att 50% or more for a while, tha CPU fan starts to blow. This is annoying. I tend to have some torrents running in the background and when connected to a handfull of peers that all want different parts of a 4gb file it eats a handfull of CPU, thrashes my page cache and eat avaliable IO from the rest of the system. Being able to choke this behaviour, by imposing a hard limit of 5% cpu and say 100mb or 200mb och page cache would be nice.

Also, my computer is a desktop. It get's turned of when I don't use it for a while. Indexing services that run when Im working annoy me (so I've turned them of, but...), since they hog system resources and make lots of noice. It would be nice to make rules for their processes so that they run very slowly and not so noticable.

Process management

Posted Apr 28, 2006 7:43 UTC (Fri) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link]

If your CPU scales (runs at various frequencies), you can tell the cpuspeed daemon to not accelerate the CPU for low-priority jobs.

Process management

Posted Apr 28, 2006 10:21 UTC (Fri) by rovfrukt (guest, #6353) [Link]

Im afraid it doesn't do scaling (older P4 2.67ghz). You have any other ideas with regard to how one can "choke" a process at certain levels of cpu-utilization?

renice them to about 19 or 20

Posted May 1, 2006 8:19 UTC (Mon) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]

See subject line.

If you set the "nice" value to 19 or 20 than it should only run while no other process is running (taking up idle time). That won't limit memory utilization nor I/O --- but the cache should handle the latter and ulimit could handle the former.

Jim Dennis

renice them to about 19 or 20

Posted May 7, 2006 16:10 UTC (Sun) by rovfrukt (guest, #6353) [Link]

Thanks, that take me some of the way, but wrt cpu utilization, not all the way. What I want is to able to lock it down so that it doesn't heat up my CPU and start the fans.

I could achive this by underclocking, but I don't mind having the reserve power every now and then. Much to often for radical underclocking to be viable at least.

Get the 'finishing touches' done automatically

Posted Apr 30, 2006 16:37 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I'd like to see the excellent EasyUbuntu (and an equivalent EasyKubuntu) fully supported - i.e. tools that download and install the most common non-free packages including VLC, media plugins, Java, Flash, Skype, etc. This takes an enormous amount of time otherwise, particularly for newbies, and even experts have to waste time doing repetitive setup steps. EasyKubuntu is pretty good, but I had to download it and unpack manually just to check that it was localised in English... EasyUbuntu looks better but I prefer KDE.

I'd also like to see fonts *automatically* tweaked so that Opera, Firefox, VLC and other Gnome tools use the same fonts selected under KDE (and vice versa of course). It's incredibly painful just getting Opera and Firefox menus to use reasonable font sizes, and end users end up having to learn *way* too much about the internals of 'the system' (how Qt, KDE, GTK, GTK2, Gnome and X11 all influence fonts, and then what you can do to just set the damn font size!!)

Ubuntu, and particularly Kubuntu which I use, is just an amazingly well-polished distro, and I love the Debian base, but it would be even better if these (very important to user perception) final touches would 'just work'...

Also, it would be great if Ubuntu's installer could somehow use Knoppix's hardware detection, which detected my video card properly - would have saved cutting and pasting the xorg.conf file.

Links:

- EasyKubuntu - http://olwin.free.fr/

- EasyUbuntu - http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/overview.html

Ubuntu to get Edgy

Posted Apr 30, 2006 17:25 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Also, it would be great if Ubuntu's installer could somehow use Knoppix's hardware detection, which detected my video card properly - would have saved cutting and pasting the xorg.conf file.

Links:

- EasyKubuntu - http://olwin.free.fr/

- EasyUbuntu - http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/overview.html