Ubuntu Archive

The developers of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution plan to make a new landmark version of the software widely available this week. Ubuntu's public schedule for releasing the software lists 1 June as the date for the new version, code-named 'Dapper Drake', to be made public. The milestone release will be officially supported by the project for a longer period than previous versions, and will be billed as suitable for enterprise use.

Some Friday fun: OSDir has some sweet screencaps of Ubuntu 6.06 RC, Kubuntu 6.06 RC, Xubuntu 6.06 RC, and Edubuntu 6.06 RC. Along with Fedora Core 5 and SuSE 10.1, this generation of desktop Linux distros has really stepped up the polish. Updated by AS: Added Xubuntu and Edubuntu links.

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork work that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." More here, while a comparison of Linux and Solaris on a T2000 is also available.

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

"The Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu teams are proud to present a second Beta release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu 6.06 LTS, codenamed "Dapper Drake". This release corrects some serious flaws in the installer present on the Desktop CD in the first Beta release. Although the text-mode install CD also forms part of this release, it has not been modified since Beta 1. An updated Xubuntu release is also in preparation and will be announced shortly." Hey look, a screenshot tour.

x64bit.net reviews Xubuntu Dapper Drake Beta, and concludes: "If your system runs slowly using Gnome or KDE then try out Xfce. On the other hand if you think Gnome or KDE is bloated and you wish you could have a desktop that was like either Gnome or KDE. Then Xfce is for you. Xubuntu is a welcomed member of the Ubuntu family. I look forward to Xubuntu 6.06 final." Rejoice over the multitude of screenshots, boys and girls.

"We are pleased to announce that the first public beta release of Xubuntu, the latest official addition to the Ubuntu family of derivative distributions has arrived. Xubuntu is built around the solid Ubuntu core and the friendly and relatively lightweight Xfce desktop environment, with the specific goal of providing a nice user experience even on older hardware." Screenshots o'plenty, boys and girls.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the beta release of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). With Ubuntu 6.06 Beta comes loads of bug fixes, a new look-and-feel, a new live-CD installer, GNOME 2.14.1, and much more." You can download it as both live-CD and install CD, and as always, available for x86, x86-64, and PowerPC.

While eyes were drawn to Novell as a potential acquisition target for Oracle, a far less expensive Linux distribution was also mentioned as a better fit for the database giant-turned-open-source advocate. The distro was Ubuntu, the most popular Linux flavor, according to the user community site DistroWatch.com. Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman and CEO, recently made some public comments about wanting his own version of Linux for Oracle. Snapping up Ubuntu would not only save Ellison and Oracle a considerable amount of money, it would also eliminate some of the headaches associated with trying to integrate a company like Novell.

MadPenguin takes a look at Flight 5 of Ubuntu Dapper, and concludes: "All in all, Ubuntu 6.06 is gearing up to be quite an impressive release. Granted, I saw some bugs during my stay on the distribution, but can I really complain? It's not a full release, so it deserves some breathing room. Considering some of the horribly authored software I've looked at over the years, I feel that Ubuntu in pre-release form is more stable than other distros when they reach final release status. It's not quite in the league of Slackware and Red Hat/Fedora in that respect yet, but it's surely getting there in a hurry."

As many already said yesterday, the Kubuntu.de story seems to be a classic example of a storm in a teacup. "Their article makes everything sound much worse than it is. The problem was that when kubuntu.org moved to a new host the sysadmin request to recreate Amu's account never got answered. Amu makes the cool Live CDs that get published along with KDE releases so it's obviously very useful for him to have an account. I should have poked Canonical's sysadmin to remind him but the account has now been added so problem solved. This doesn't mean, as some people seem to have suggested, that Canonical is in any way dropping support for Kubuntu, they continue to be wonderfully supportive, both to the community of developers and commercially if you want to buy a support contract off them."

Troubles for the Kubuntu project: a number of Kubuntu developers are complaining that Canonical is not answering their requests. They state: "We all from the kubuntu.de-team have pursued this aim together, but most of the work has been done by Andreas Mueller (amu). He is not only co-founder and unpayed developer of the Kubuntu-project, but he's also hosting this website and he's taking over all the arising expenses. During our endeavours for Kubuntu, there were made several requests to Canonical. All those requests are unanswered 'till today! Up to now, there is only one payed developer. Since Canonical ignores all our personal and partly financial engagement until now we have to assume that Canonical is not willing to make Kubuntu a '1st class distribution'."

This project combines Ubuntu and MythTV into a lightweight, undemanding HTPC computer. "The plans were, roughly, to install a hard drive, move to a more powerful Linux distribution, and add PVR capabilites to the system. Because the computer was already situated in my living room, making it into a personal video recorder was an obvious choice, though doing this on a Mini-ITX Linux system would surely take a bit of finesse."

Not too long ago Mark Shuttleworth proposed a delay of six weeks for the release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Today, after discussion within the community, the delay was approved and announced. "June 1st 2006 is the updated release date for Ubuntu Dapper, Desktop and Server editions, a delay of 6 weeks over the previous release date of April 20." More information in the release schedule.