As you have probably noticed, new versions have arrived of Ubuntu, Xubuntu and other derivatives. One of the most exciting new features has received far less publicity than it deserves – the ability to ‘install’ it onto your USB flash drive with just a few clicks. The advantages are obvious: just plug your flash drive into a computer and run your favourite operating system. What’s more, everything you do – installing applications, saving documents, editing preferences – will be saved to your flash drive and will be available to you every time you run it! The best news is that it’s astoundingly easy: all it takes is a few clicks.
Isn’t this the same thing Fedora has? https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/
It looks like they want the exact same thing there is already a windows port why rewrite? Hell its even in the same language.
Isn’t funny how something is done elsewhere and ignored, but as soon as Ubuntu picks it up it’s like “look what we can do now, Ubuntu is the roxors!”
Sad but it’s becoming like another microsoft where they invent everything after plagiarizing it from someone else!
Except that this isn’t plagiarizing. It’s one distro packaging something that’s been developed – FOR THE PURPOSE OF EVERYBODY ELSE USING IT TOO.
There is no competition with open source, only proprietary products have that mandate.
It’s called sharing, and it shouldn’t cause you to drop your monocle. Ahem.
Bad choice of words on my behalf, should have said they steal the limelight after someone else does all the hard work!
There is no competition with open source, only proprietary products have that mandate
There certainly is competition in open source. A lot of the forks we see compete with the original maintainers’ vision. This can be a good thing since a group of people might decide they don’t like the direction of development of say, X Window, and they come up with something that suits their needs better. Maybe their isn’t monetary competition but when your module gets dropped in favor of a newer or better one it certainly drives progress. It is a more friendly kind of competition but it can also get hot and heated. It hurts a little when your own design gets dropped. We like our own stuff to succeed. It makes a developer feel good.
You’re being childish if you really think that there is no competition in the open source world.
No open source devs or other folks are interested in climbing the greasy pole, or using their skills in open source to leverage a job elsewhere? No distro is interested in what the other distros are up to? No distro is interested in bumping up its usage figures, which in almost all cases can only come by taking users from other distros? No distro is interested in using the latest and greatest software, because without it the distro will lost some of its appeal compared to others? No developer is interested in producing the best program of its kind, which by definition means better than the others and which also invariably means taking users from the others?
The open source world is rife with competition, and open source on the server is a ruthlessly competitive commercial business. It’s time we laid to rest the myth of devs in back bedrooms only “scratching an itch” in a land of milk and honey. Life doesn’t work this way, and Linux’s main players are all hard-fightin’ multi-billion corporations – Red Hat, Novell and IBM. Yes, there are plenty who scratch their itch. But the ones whose software really makes an impact and goes on to be used by thousands or millions of people tend to take things an awful lot more seriously than that.
In fact, I welcome competition. It is a powerful incentive to improve and behave. Without it, arguably, Linux at least would still be stuck in the 1970s, with new users (if it had any) being patronized by greybeards telling them that graphical x-servers = bad, bad, bad. Thank god all those days are over.
Agree, we all share between distributions.
I think the issue is that Ubuntu users and even Canonical to an extend tend to take credit for open source innovation as a whole.
Last year at Linux world I saw a Canonical session on desktop linux and it was shocking to see all the projects they took credit for :
– Plug and play in Linux with HAL & Dbus
– Graphical network management with NetworkManager
– Improved X server
– Improvements in Linux device driver support for more platforms.
Sadly none of them were developed or funded by canonical.
But they certainly do a good job of packaging.
Not sure about some Ubuntu users, there are many kinds of them, some maybe also less informed than others, of course. That shouldn’t cause serious headache to you or anyone else.
But as to Canonical, I haven’t seen them being guilty of taking credit for open source innovation as whole any more than others. Claims that they would have been doing that a lot seem mostly FUD to me, maybe caused by envy and Ubuntu popularity. Canonical knows, like everyone else, that most of their software is open source (in Ubuntu’s case most of it comes from Debian too), so developed by many others too than just themselves.
Open source is – by the very definition – almost always developed in the open, not behind the closed doors of some commercial company only. Often the developer community is worldwide even in small open source projects. Also innovation tends to happen in that worldwide non-proprietary community, not behind the closed doors of some company. So how could some open source company even try to take sole credit for open source?
So ubuntu is to blame for that? Whos “fault” is it?
Drama queen.
I think there have been lots of Fedora news on OSnews too. I remember some Fedora news where the main topic were the new Fedora desktop wallpapers and not much else…
Fedora and Ubuntu are just popular, therefore covered more in the news. OSnews publishes news – that simple. News stories just don’t drop down from the sky but someone has to write them first.
If you do find interesting news about other distros or operating systems somewhere else, please, submit those news to OSnews too, we others might be interested in reading them too. Of course, even better would be to write news about interesting topics not covered elsewhere yet, although not everyone has the skills and means.
Anyway, I agree in the sense that I would like to read more news stories about other distributions too. There are many interesting specialized niche distros (source-based, mediabox distros etc.) inventing new things all the time. But as they are often small, there may just not be that many news about them.
Blehh.., go trolling elsewhere, please. Why are you talking in terms of closed commercial software development when talking about open source? Like already said above, you cannot call it plagiarizing if someone uses some opensource software elsewhere as to have many users and developers – everywhere, not just inside one company – is one main goal of open source.
Also, Microsoft has been inventing many things by themselves too.
And also, Ubuntu is far from Microsoft as the company behind Ubuntu is not even profitable yet and only employs a relatively small number of people still. Ubuntu also hasn’t advertised itself much more than any other commercial distro has, the reasons for its popularity are elsewhere.
Well, sending free CD-ROMs like what Ubuntu has been doing, might be too expensive for other distro makers – lacking a millionaire as their sponsor – which has definitely been one reason, but only one, for Ubuntu’s popularity. But other than that, nothing prevents other distros or operating systems from doing things better and becoming more popular than Ubuntu – but, whining and trolling is surely not the way to do it.
Edited 2008-11-09 11:43 UTC
It’s because you Fedora/SuSE/Mandriva/whatever fanboys have constantly underestimated the power of marketing. You people are constantly complaining about Ubuntu being only about marketing, yet here you see another piece of evidence that people simply aren’t going to know what you have done unless you do more marketing.
You fanboys should stop complaining. How can you possibly expect the world to know your achievements unless you market your efforts? Stop treating marketing as some kind of evil act, and start improving your marketing! Marketing is not evil, it is important. Until you understand that you have no right to complain. I’m sorry, your current situation is entirely thanks to your own behavior, not because of Ubuntu.
Edited 2008-11-09 12:58 UTC
There is no hallmark of success more reliable than gratuitous criticism from a wide community of also-rans.
When you see others plagiarizing you but with a little worse success you should congratulate yourself for good work and feel proud for having made something worth copying.
When you see others plagiarizing you but with better success you should still feel proud for having made something worth copying. But now copy someone else’s stuff and improve on it
unfortunately that seems to be all to common in the Ubuntu community.
I think all Ubuntu’s “innovations” came from somewhere else – Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.
Now it’s all open source so we shouldn’t snipe about that but I think the issue is that Ubuntu users (and maybe Canonical) tend to take credit for all this “innovation”.
Canonical does a great job at integration – putting the bits together, but I can only think of one Canonical “innovation” and that’s upstart.
Exactly, we shouldn’t snipe about it as it is open source.
It surprises me to see how many people still view and evaluate open source development using the unsuitable premises of closed proprietary development. However, it is a different paradigm so a complete paradigm shift is necessary.
Open source is – by the very definition – developed in the open, not behind the closed doors of some commercial company only. Why don’t many people still seem to get this, even though they may say that they support open source?
As to taking sole credit for some open source software, I just haven’t seen Canonical being guilty of it, any more than others. Claims that they would have been doing that a lot seem mostly FUD to me, maybe caused by envy and Ubuntu popularity. Canonical (& Redhat, Novell, etc.) knows, like everyone else, that most of their software is open source, so developed by many others too than just themselves.
Now, some commercial open source companies like Redhat or Novell, and Canonical too, might sometimes have incentives to develop something behind closed doors too, and (maybe) only open source it after that, in order to have something special to offer and to stay more competitive. In a way, Canonical did the same thing with Launchpad. Such things can be said to come from a single company only – originally. But those are rare exceptions, and most of their software is open source, developed in the worldwide open source community from the start.
So usually open source innovation and development – by the very definition of open source – doesn’t happen inside this or that company only. That is the whole idea! Redhat, Novell, Canonical and others all take part in that same worldwide non-proprietary community, maybe concentrating and putting more resources on some fields than others, but all cooperating in the same worldwide open source community. If they compete, the competition is more about services, support, marketing and such things.
Edited 2008-11-09 23:55 UTC
I doubt that. Red Hat’s usb creator works with other distros as well. This thing is natural progression. We have to remember that live cd’s started out being installable on hard drives. So this was the next step.
Ins’t it funny how on every item about Ubuntu so many people has to whine like little spoiled brats about how much exposure Ubuntu gets?
You man like how Linus invented Linux long after Unix and Minix
Edited 2008-11-11 16:08 UTC
Not only that, but the Fedora liveusb-creator project already runs under Windows. I just used it a couple days ago…
Reinventing the wheel is how free open source works. People have an idea, have their view of the software world and start hacking away. Rarely I see those enthusiastic people doing reseach about already existing, similar solutions.
The difference between free software and { Microsoft | Apple | … } stuff comes into play when technologies mature, become common knowledge: Developers have a base they don’t have to pay for and they can extend and customize for their own needs.
That said, I’m wondering why installation onto an USB stick is news at all. Last week I’ve installed FreeBSD onto such a device just like I’d do with an ordinary hard disk. No special software needed, works like a charm.
I’m pretty sure Linux distros can do that as well. Shouldn’t be the title of the story more like “Make an Ubuntu Live CD’s data storage persistent”?
I think there are two ideas in conflict here – IIUC, the article is describing an app to install a live image to usb, not to install the distro itself.
Big difference – I think this sounds like unetbootin but specific to Ubuntu, anyone?
I’ve done this years ago with Damn Small Linux, but I had trouble finding PCs that would boot off a USB drive. There are a lot of old PCs around, so don’t count on this always working.
Opensuse has also its own tool. Should we blame them to be another Microsoft-like? Is it the first tool that the open source world is duplicating? Surely not. And as said in a previous comment, that’s how it works. If we follow the critics posted here, why would be have epiphany when Firefox exists? Why Koffice if Openoffice does it better? Why Banshee if Rhymthbox? Why F-spot if Digikam? Why 30 distributions when we could have one?
Why am I posting this critic of Opensource if others did it before and better than me??
granted, i do not know much about these matters, i have only used linux for about 8-9 years.. im not a very “geeky” person, so i cannot figure out, what exactly is the news in this? what differs this great invention which ubuntu has made, from say… just… installing ubuntu, or any other distribution onto… an… usb stick, which is.. hmm, as far as i see it, ALSO marvellously easy.
this ubuntu hyping is insane, they are inventing nothing, yet they are praised for making linux and every piece of software easy, hell, soon they will get the credit for making it easy for people to find the physical power button on their computers..
… support for floppy disks in 8.10?
I do not believe that this is an actual bug.
Ubuntu didn’t suck anymore.
It simply … sti***.
God only knows why you bother to comment on an Ubuntu topic.
To waste our time and lives since he obviously have too much of the first and nothing of the second.
.. if it worked.
I have discovered it immediately after installing intrepid. However, after selecting the iso image and the usb stick and clicking “make startup disk”, it just sits and do nothing. No console output either.
Tested on two different systems, albeit with the same stick.
Seems I have to stay with sysreccd for the time being.
First of all, Ubuntu didn’t invent this concept. Other Linux distros have sported this feature for years now. Secondly, perhaps one of the reasons this “new” feature of Ubuntu hasn’t been widely touted is because it rarely works as advertised. In my experience, it failed to copy the Linux kernel itself to the USB drive. Umm, that’s a pretty important thing to forget. <sigh> as usual, Ubuntu has rushed an edition out the door with a lot of whiz-bang features (most borrowed from other distros) and a lot of unfixed bugs.
Why do you see it worth saying: “most features borrowed from other distros”?? It is open source, for heaven’s sake! That is how it works: you can use and modify the work of others that they have open sourced just for that very purpose.
And it is certainly nowhere even hinted in the article that Ubuntu would have invented this. It only says shortly that it is new to Ubuntu.
By the way, I wonder why so many commentators also in this Ubuntu-related article on OSnews have started talking about Ubuntu or Canonical being innovative or not, or Ubuntu or Canonical maybe taking credit for this or that, as such topics are completely off-topic, at least in regards to this article? Credit to you, cmost, for saying at least something about the actual subject too.
Edited 2008-11-10 00:42 UTC
My guess is they’ve been drinking the Greg K-H kool-aid.
Lenny has a live-cd / live-usb creator as well, though it looks to me like it’s very different from the one that Ubuntu and Fedora use. Though it also is currently broken, well at least it was the last I tried it (about a month ago).
Though I thought the special thing about the USB Linux sticks now, is that they have a different file-system that doesn’t cause as many read / writes on USB devices, so that it doesn’t wear them out as fast.
All these comments, and no one mentioned THAT yet…..
It is quite common, that someone is writing about one distributor gets credits for the others investment. But, folks, GNU is a such kind of licenses — anonymous contributor’s license. If you want to be listed as authors or contributors – ship it under BSD-style license with an explicit requirement.