Submitted by The Ubuntu team has released the first milestones en route to Ubuntu 6.10, Edgy Eft, of all flavours (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu). The kernel has been upgraded to 2.6.17 in all flavours, and the GNOME version has been updated to 2.15.4 with GTK+ 2.10 in Ubuntu. Notable Kubuntu changes are listed as well. Screenshots of Ubuntu and Kubuntu are also available.
The Kubuntu people have posted a list of changes, that’s something at least…
Where can I find such info for regular Ubuntu?
The screenshots sure didn’t show many changes either…
from
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2006-July/00…
The primary changes from Dapper have been the re-merging of changes
from Debian. Common to all variants, we have upgraded the kernel to
2.6.17. In Ubuntu, Gnome has been updated to 2.15.4 and GTK+ to 2.10.
This is SOP for the Ubuntu project. The first milestone for each development cycle is a resynch with Debian Sid and the inclusion of the latest development release of GNOME. They continually resynch with Sid and the GNOME dev branch until GNOME goes gold, at which point they freeze and spend about two months dedicated to fixing bugs and polishing the interface.
Same proven formula. It seems to be working.
Ubuntu… fabulous piece of software.
IMHO the only way it lacks is in it’s UI.. It’s too “brown”, and not overly attractive.. I talk ONLY for myself, but the first thing I feel I always have to do when installing Ubuntu is run to a gnome theme site and change everything – which is a crying shame.
Be GREAT if they got some real DE art wiz’s behind them and came up with nice colourful icons, backdrops, window borders etc. that can give off just as much eyecandy feasting as OS X or Vista… The style Ubuntu uses now – somewhat reminds me of the Windows ME generation. Maybe Ubuntu should hold an “artwork competition”
Again though, Ubuntu is a wonderful piece of software that deserves applause – My hat truely goes off to them.
Some people like default theme, some others don’t.
“Be GREAT if they got some real DE art wiz’s behind them and came up with nice colourful icons, backdrops, window borders etc. that can give off just as much eyecandy feasting as OS X or Vista…”
Erh… And how many cpu time eaten by this without using Xgl ?!
Anyway, Edgy is still really alpha. I will test it in a VMWare virtual PC. I will wait for Edgy RC before installing it for good.
As far as their widget and icon themes, I’ll agree that the pre-Dapper themes were terrible. I immediately switched over to one of the blue themes. But the Dapper theme is actually pretty good and it’s won me over. If you think about it, there’s no reason why blue is the only pleasant background colour. People feel just as relaxed looking out on the blue ocean, as they do looking out on a thick green forest, as they do looking out on the brown-orange savanah. You just have to avoid the more gaudy or depressingly dark browns, greens, and blues if you want to make a good theme.
As far as background colors are concerned, I agree 100%, even in Dapper. It’s far too dark. Here is the current artwork that’s being proposed for Edgy:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyProposals/Summary_18JUL…
Personally, I think “Simple Ubuntu” background which comes with Ubuntu is actually pretty good (it’s my background) and it fits prefectly with the current Dapper theme. IMO, it’s a lot better than the proposed Edgy wallpapers, which try too hard to avoid being dark and cross the line into gaudy:
http://art.ubuntu.com/images/backgrounds/Ubuntu-Simple_Human_1600x1…
Yeah, I doubt that artwork will be used. It doesn’t feel like what I would say exudes a neutral “default” experience — puts the desktop background too much in your face, like it’s shouting, “Look at me! I’m beautiful! Use only transparent console windows, or my lawyer will sue!”
Edited 2006-07-21 12:33
Well, I agree the backgrounds all pretty much look atrocious, and very few of the of the text logos are remotely pleasing to the eye, but I must say some of the “log-on” stuff really catches my eye.
It’s far too dark. Here is the current artwork that’s being proposed for Edgy:
Here’s my take on it: I don’t have too many problems with the brown color. If the source material is done in grayscale, it can be balanced, contrasted and changed to the color scheme you want.
My problem with the logo proposals is that they just plain SUCK. It’s very easy to see how they are done. They all share the common scheme of using reflections and this is either done by using the good old Aqua gloss or by a bumpmap or emboss filter.
It just doesn’t look believable and it also doesn’t look like it has taken that long to create, but the creator has relied on the effects of the drawing program and overused them. The logo is drowned in effects, gloss, gradients and whatnot. It looks cheap and not quiet and calm like it’s supposed to. It’s something you’d see on a movie poster with a lot of action and not on a desktop boot screen.
For the record, logo_jmak_00.png is the one I think is the closest to having a balance between signaling that this is the Ubuntu Logo and that it took a little time to get the edge reflections to look the way they do, even though they still don’t add up to believability.
“Simple Ubuntu” is a step in the right direction, but it still does not signal that Ubuntu should be taken seriously. How long did “Simple Ubuntu” take to design? Probably not long enough. It has a vector drawn very clean feel and absolutely no subtle detail, which could have been cool, like a very subtle film grain effect on the background. It looks computer-made, not hand-made.
If you look at the standard MacOSX Tiger background, it has that. It also has the quality that it’s hard to make out how it’s done, and that’s a sign of how much work went into creating it.
For starters, I’d like to see a totally cleaned theme with no effects whatsoever, but with the right colors. When this is done, you can start adding effects carefully.
Edited 2006-07-21 16:10
IMHO the only way it lacks is in it’s UI.. It’s too “brown”, and not overly attractive.. I talk ONLY for myself, but the first thing I feel I always have to do when installing Ubuntu is run to a gnome theme site and change everything – which is a crying shame.
That may be true. I kind of like the brown though, its a nice Earthy tone. I think thats what they were getting at with the default color scheme, the linux distro for the people and the “humanity to others”. Peace on Earth
I changed the background to something off DigitalBlasphemy, and I went down to one panel.
I downloaded this last night and then attempted installations on my two laptops. One being a Dell Latitide C640 and the other being a D620.
The C620 just locked up when it looked like X was about to be started, even in the safe graphics mode. The D620 just bitched about my screen and that X couldn’t be started, again, even in safe mode!
Never mind, I’ll just have to wait for a slightly more complete version I guess. 🙂
Repeat after me : it is alpha quality code. It is alpha quality code
Yes, alpha quality code and all, but these problems with X configuration are getting a little long in the tooth, release after release, distro after distro. Some distros are better at this than others, and, in the spirit of OSS, I would have thought that they’d have been able to learn enough from each other by now to figure out how to do this right (and share this solution across distributions).
I will say this about Dell laptops and X: not a great combination. Try as I might, I cannot get X working perfectly on my Dell Inspiron 500m with i855GM graphics. Starting X corrupts my vesa-tng framebuffer consoles, when opening the lid I used to need to do CTRL-ALT-F1 CTRL-ALT-F7 to reactivate the X console, and with more recent version of X the lid opening situation is fixed, but sometimes it fails to display the mouse cursor if I closed the lid while in my X console. The fix is to switch to a text console, close the lid, reopen it, and switch back to the X console. I’m fairly experienced at configuring X, and I’ve never had any of these problems on other brands of laptops.
Take this at face value, but I’ve had these problems with multiple distributions (Ubuntu and Gentoo) on this hardware. If I would purchase a non-Apple laptop today, it would be a Thinkpad.
Take this at face value, but I’ve had these problems with multiple distributions (Ubuntu and Gentoo) on this hardware. If I would purchase a non-Apple laptop today, it would be a Thinkpad.
Thinkpads are usually pretty good for Linux. The Compaq laptops I’ve tried (I currently own a V2310) have also worked well with Ubuntu. With Dapper, all peripherals work – including the Flash Card reader (for SDs at least, I haven’t tried with other media).
“I would have thought that they’d have been able to learn enough from each other by now to figure out how to do this right (and share this solution across distributions).”
Yes I agree.
Linux is a very fragmented effort. Developers seem to be in love with reinventing the wheel.
Hopefully one or two distros will become so poplular that more concentration of development resources results in simple things like this being finally addressed.
One change I would like to see is including a text installer on the same cd as the graphical installer. After trying to get Ubuntu 6.06 loaded on my laptop last night, it took 2 hours for the graphical installer to load the partition manager, and even then it didn’t finish loading. Previous versions of Ubuntu (with the text installer) didn’t have this issue, it was only with 6.06 and its live cd to install option.
I realize I can download the alternate cd which will have the text only installer, but it couldn’t be that hard to have the same installer on the regular live cd.
I realize I can download the alternate cd which will have the text only installer, but it couldn’t be that hard to have the same installer on the regular live cd.Actually, it is. Ubiquity (the graphical installer) pretty much just dumps the live system from the cd onto the chosen partition. Debian Installer installs everything from deb-packages. There isn’t enough room on one cd for both a complete live environment and a set of packages.
Anyway, your real problem seems to be that the partitioner wasn’t working very well. The good news is that the partitioner is being rewritten (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubiquity/AdvancedPartitionerRewrite), and hopefully this will fix a lot of the problems that people have been experiencing with the current one.
Sounds great, +1 for you for being informative about this. I didn’t realize the live cd had no packages. I thought it worked much in the same way as the other install cds in that it had the live cd, and the packages to install it. But I guess a 700mb cd wouldn’t be able to hold all that info. I’m looking forward to that new partition manager.
I must ask. What the heck is with ubuntu’s naming schemes? Really, I’m curious. They don’t make any sense and sound retarded (to me).
No kidding – the names get dumber each release. It makes it harder to be taken seriously with names like that.
Maybe no one cares if you take it seriously.
I’ll agree with you two, I’m not crazy about the naming schemes either. I see that the kernel is starting to do this as well, or if they have always done it I just never noticed it.
For the kernel, you never noticed.
For Ubuntu, that’s part of their policy.
Some people actually have fun doing this. Just use the numbers if the name annoys you.
Well.. they are fun. Just personally speaking, I have also a lot more chances to recall exactly what a release was like (oooh breezy had those nice new gnome flashing window list thingies) by using its name than using some obscure number (5.10)
It’s a codename. You can use the numbers if you don’t want to scare your boss I think.
Each version is named after the year and month it was released. So, the current one is 6.06 since it was released in June 2006, and the next one will (probably) be 6.10, assuming that things go as planned and it is released in October.
but they’re fun… the names I mean!
anyway… brown could be a really great colour, just that they always pick the wrong shade of brown IMHO.
As an example… I use Candido Calm theme http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=41914 it’s brown and it matches the icons and the rest of the stuff.
but still… I really like the new human icon theme.. it’s just great! and blue really became boring…
just one thing… I know what a Badger is… I also know what a Drake is… but what the hell is EFT supposed to be? electronic funds transfer? do they finally want some money or what?
I think it is a young newt. I dug up the mailing list post that explains it all: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-April/000064….
How is long-term support and frequent releases going to work? If there is a release every 6 months and each release is supported 3 years, that would leave Ubuntu supporting 6 versions at once. I assume that future releases will not be LTS such as Dapper, or am I wrong?
For now (and for the next few releases), they will be 18 months support only.
So, it will be simpler. And in 3 years, a lot of dapper user will have switched to at least edgy + 2
Well, I guess it’d be the same as say RedHat supporting their older versions, or Microsoft, or whatever. Basically you have Dapper LTS, which means for Ubuntu that if you run Dapper Drake on a Server, you can purchase support for up to FIVE years, whereas support for Desktop installs is THREE years.
If you think about it, it sounds about right, since usually after five years or so, most companies are about ready for an upgrade. Of course the beauty is with Debian based distributions, it’s quite an easy task to do an upgrade. The real question though is if Apt can handle a upgrade from one OS to the next in a 5 year span? If it were standard Debian, I’d say yes (they’re packaging skills and policies are MUCH better than Ubuntu’s. Ubuntu has the tendency to just see something new and package it right away (which is good for a Desktop/new technology distro which Ubuntu is) whereas Debian will argue back and forth on which way is better, even to the point of package naming conventions, so that a transition, etc will be smoother and their packages in general will be cream of the crop. Basically this is what makes a Debian stable release truly STABLE.)
With Debian, who makes a stable release every two years or so, they still support their older release for a long time (I think Woody just barely lost support, and Etch still has until December to be released), an upgrade from release to release should and does go quite smooth. With Ubuntu, who knows, with how rapid their releases are, if you waited the full 5 years to upgrade your server, the software could very well be so different as to make upgrading impossible. I hope they keep that in mind.
duh nvm
Edited 2006-07-21 15:15
Anyone else really dislike the new-ish osdir layout that they introduced several months ago? They used to have the thumbnails on the bottom, and you could scroll through them with a horizontal scroll bar. Now they have them on right, and I can’t figure out how to scroll them without a mouse with a scroll wheel/bar/gesture!!
I love the service that osdir provides to the OSS community, but I wish I could figure out how to use their new layout at work, where I guess they haven’t gotten the memo about the recent (!) advancements in pointer technology. I’m probably just missing something, so anyone have any tips?
I put this on my laptop and I was disappointed to see that most of the gnome version isn’t in there yet… important updates like gnome-screensaver and gnome-power-manager are still on the old version, and don’t even seem to be working at all (well not correctly)… gnome-power-manager had some very cool new features in the new version and I can’t wait to use it… a bit disappointing its not in edgy yet… I can’t wait for it to get further in development…
I saw a couple of comments about Edgy being alpha software. Well for most mac users Dapper is pretty much alpha software because is simply doesn’t work with g5 processors – let hope it gets beyoud this stage in 6.10!