Ubuntu Technical Board on Feisty Fawn [LWN.net]

Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn (aka 7.04) release is scheduled for mid-April. The fourth Herd CD, an alpha release reasonably free of showstoppers, should be out by the time you read this, for most or all of the official variants (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu).

Ubuntu has always taken a middle road in the free vs. non-free course of Linux distributions. Middle enough that two Ubuntu-based distributions have variants that are working on both sides of the fence. gNewSense strives for 100% FSF approved purity while Linux Mint is willing to sacrifice some freedom for convenience.

Like Debian, its parent project, Ubuntu has always provided some proprietary software, in the Multiverse repository which is not enabled by default, similar to the non-free repository in Debian.

Early in Feisty's development cycle it was reported that Ubuntu would ship binary drivers by default in Feisty. Mostly it sounded like it would be even easier to get at those drivers; however according to the latest announcement from Ubuntu's Technical Board it sounds pretty much like the status quo. "Ubuntu 7.04 will preserve the status quo with respect to proprietary video drivers. As in previous releases, these drivers will be provided for the convenience of users who choose to use them, but they will not be activated by default."

This announcement also looked at the status of the PowerPC edition. "Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, the PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team."

Those interested may join the Ubuntu PowerPC Architecture Team to work on the unofficial port. PowerPC releases will be maintained for all supported earlier releases. PowerPC servers will be supported until 2011 on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

(Log in to post comments)

Ubuntu Technical Board on Feisty Fawn

Posted Feb 15, 2007 19:48 UTC (Thu) by davidm870 (subscriber, #3930) [Link]

Good! A fellow apostrophe nazi. But shouldn't it be

s/it\'s parent project/its parent project/ ?

Ubuntu Technical Board on Feisty Fawn

Posted Feb 16, 2007 5:58 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

But shouldn't it be

s/it\'s parent project/its parent project/ ?

Only if you do it in the shell; vi (for example) doesn't care.

Greg

Ubuntu Technical Board on Feisty Fawn

Posted Feb 16, 2007 21:22 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

In the shell, you would need to quote spaces as well.

Ubuntu Technical Board on Feisty Fawn

Posted Feb 28, 2007 13:10 UTC (Wed) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]

Hopefully Fiesty ships with Intel 3D graphics drivers for the X3000, that is found in many Core Duo 2 boards. (it ships with X.Org 7.2).

Failure to do so... will mean a lot of shiney new desktops won't run accelerated 3D without sticking in one of those nasty proprietary video cards. :(