Mark Shuttleworth Proposes Delaying next Ubuntu

Beuno writes "Mark Shuttleworth has proposed on the ubuntu-art mailing list to postpone the 'Dapper Drake' release by 6 weeks. He lays out the reasons pretty clearly: the delay should make the release a more user-friendly distro. He has also called up a community meeting in April 14th on IRC for community input. Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?" Commentary on this also available from the Tectonic site.

Error

[Doytch (950946)]

He proposes a town hall for March 14, not April.

Delay in Debian Derived Distro??

[doublem (118724)]

I'm Shocked, shocked I tell you that a distro based on, and dependent upon, Debian packages would choose to focus on some kind of abstract "usability" or "stability" issue over fast and frequent updates!

Where's the bleeding edge code? Where's the "It compiled this morning let's push it out" mentality that's so common with Debian based Distros??

I'm astounded and saddened. Microsoft has updates coming out weekly. It can't be good for Ubuntu if it loses the "update war" with Microsoft. If you lose the update war, everything else is down hill from there.

Question? Answer.

[ImaNihilist (889325)]

Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?

Absolutely.

Re:Question? Answer.

[jdhutchins (559010)]

They don't include mp3 and dvd stuff because they don't want to get sued. DVD playing stuff with decss is on sketchy legal ground, and mp3 decoders are covered by vaiours patents. They would include them if they could- but they don't have the money to fight a losing court case.

Re:Question? Answer.

[homer_ca (144738)]

Yes, there's an automated installer called Automatix [ubuntuforums.org]. It's only for Ubuntu Breezy, but there should be a new one when Dapper is final.

Re:Question? Answer.

[Schraegstrichpunkt (931443)]

But the people I hand the disks out to wonder why the hell this "Linux" thing can't even play their MP3s!

So tell them the truth: the technology exists, but U.S. law makes it risky to distribute it.

Re:Question? Answer.

[jdhutchins (559010)]

Maybe smaller distros can get away with providing it, but that's just because they are flying under the radar. Larger distros would get caught. As far as I know, none of the larger distros include dvd or mp3 by default.

The testers seem to agree

[dtfinch (661405)]

505 users in favor of the delay, 50 against at last count.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=142536 [ubuntuforums.org]

Dapper is coming along nicely, but there are a number of bugs that might not get the attention they deserve if Dapper is released on schedule.

Their Flight 5 CD is out. It should be quite stable for normal use.

"Linux for human beings"

[theurge14 (820596)]

As a Gentoo user, I tried out Ubuntu on an old Toshiba laptop about a month or three ago when the current version came out. I liked what a I saw, but I ran into to huge problems. One, Ubuntu completely screwed up the monitor settings for the laptop, and the sound was completely futzed. I found the solution to fixing the monitor settings on an Ubuntu user forum (involved hand editing X.org's conf file) and the sound, well, I managed to get it to play somewhat but GNOME still never detected it properly.

If Ubuntu wants to be "Linux for human beings" it needs all the polish it can get after that experience.

Keep up the good work guys.

Re:"Linux for human beings"

[jsight (8987)]

More anecdotes... I tried Ubuntu on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000 w/ ATI) and it installed cleanly, and handled all suspend modes perfectly, right out of the box! Sound worked, the wireless (Intel) worked, and the display was quite nice (albeit with no 3D acceleration).

The only real issue was the 5.10 didn't handle ALPS Touchpads well at all. It was almost unusable as a result. :(

Fortunately, the Dapper betas have fixed that, and Ubuntu really is the most usable easy distribution for this box. OpenSuSe and Fedora both had significantly greater issues (either with suspend or the touchpad, or both).

Re:"Linux for human beings"

[Urusai (865560)]

The necessity of hand-editing xorg.conf or frankly any .conf file keeps Ubuntu and Linux in general out of the mainstream. Joe Sixpack isn't going to do it. Fundamental things such as video, keyboard, and mouse should work immediately, with sane and functional fallbacks.

Re:"Linux for human beings"

[theurge14 (820596)]

Well, one one hand, this didn't stop Windows 3.x or Windows 95 from becoming ubiquitous (autoexec.bat and config.sys anyone?). But in fairness, that was 10-15 years ago.

Well...

[Jugalator (259273)]

A 6 week delay doesn't sound earth shattering to me... I fail to see the problem here, to be honest. Especially if it's about improving usability, an area critical for Linux adoption, which is one of the main purposes for this particular distro.

To me, this feels basically like delaying an extra security heavy distro 6 weeks to implement verify a new security protocol implementation works correctly.

Support/enterprise

[slavemowgli (585321)]

Considering that they want this to be the first Ubuntu release that's supported for a long time and that can compete with things like SuSE's or RedHat's enterprise distributions, I'd say six weeks are perfectly acceptable.

Really...

[Clazzy (958719)]

To be honest, Dapper is very stable and polished already. There's mixed reactions over the new Clearlooks scheme they've implemented but overall, it's turning out very well. I can't speak for the localisation issues, but a stable release is much better than a rushed release. If you want to try Dapper, Flight 5 should be just fine.

d'uh.

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist (906833)]

>Is it really worth delaying the release for more then a month just to polish it out a little bit?

there are hundreds of distros already, and the only thing they all lack is polish, so yes.

what's the hurry?

YES!

[geddes (533463)]

One of the reasons, imho, that Blizzard's games are always so good, is that they are not afraid to delay them. They test and test and tweak and tweak and when they game comes out, it is of the highest quality. Blizzard is admirable because they respect that programming is an art that can't be rushed. Most companies rush their products so they can start generating revenue.

Patience is a virtue. Ubuntu has no need to generate revenue, and if it takes six more weeks to make the release more usable for human beings, that can only be a good thing.

Not just polish...

[BaltikaTroika (809862)]

I think that almost everybody would agree that a little more time spent making a product better is a good thing.

It's not just about polish, though. TFA lays out a number of points where improvements are needed:

1. Testing
2. Certification
3. Localisation
4. (last but not least) Polish

Improvements to Asian localisation should help a ton of people - we're not all English speakers. :) Any steps, no matter how small, to appeal to the Chinese/Korean/Japanese markets will probably pay off well.

Not that it all matters to me, though... I use SUSE. :)

BaltikaTroika

Give them more time; they've earned it

[happymedium (861907)]

I remember keeping track of the Breezy Badger planning wiki before that version was released, and it seemed to me that the team deferred many of their major goals... on the other hand, it looks like most improvements planned for Dapper have been implemented already, as Shuttleworth notes in his message:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+specs [launchpad.net]

I'll refrain from Debian comparisons, as they're not needed to communicate what stellar work the team has done here. Point is, Ubuntu users and admins ought to support this delay, for the same reason I support Ubuntu... the Ubuntu team simply has its shit together, moreso than that of any other freely available distribution.

Let Shuttleworth strategize to take on Red Hat, SuSE, and Vista--because Ubuntu actually has a fighting chance. That prospect ought to excite Ubuntu partisans (like me) and fence-sitters alike.

I'm all for the delay if the goals are met

[koreth (409849)]

One of Shuttleworth's reasons for the delay is

After the Asia business tour I realised that we need to improve our support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian fonts, translations, input methods and supporting tools.

Amen to that! I tried installing Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop, and in the end I just gave up getting Chinese input working properly (she's Taiwanese and sends a lot of mail in Chinese to her friends back home.) After a couple of long nights spent fiddling with it, I could get it to sort of work with some apps, but this is one area where Windows beats Linux hands down -- after I gave up and installed Windows on her machine, enabling Chinese input took me all of about 30 seconds to do, and it works flawlessly in every app she uses.

Re:User friendly?

[Yaztromo (655250)]

You toss control back to whatever would otherwise load when it fails.

The fact that you're not a software engineer shows.

Want to know what would have otherwise loaded? The Windows Bootloader, which would have been within the exact same 512b sector that Grub now occupies. Boot loaders on PCs are extremely restricted in what they can do -- their code can be no larger than 446b in size, they run in real mode, and basically must rely directly on BIOS for all of their I/O routines.

In effect, this is 1980's technology, and flexability is virtually nil. The primary boot loader can't just pass its duties off to another boot loader, as there aren't really sufficient instructions available to do this, and the two boot loaders cannot occupy the same space on the drive.

If you're looking for something to blame for this situation, it's the fact that the architecture of the PC BIOS hasn't changed significantly in more than 20 years. It's still firmly rooted in the days of 160KB floppy booting, where the idea of a second-stage boot loader for choosing what OS you want to boot would never have occurred (want to boot a different OS on a diskette-only system? Use a different boot disk). BIOS should have died a long time ago.

Boot loaders like GRUB do the best they can with what little resources and possibilities they are given. I'm sorry that the GRUB developers don't have access to your screwy system to test and debug on. Here I've run GRUB on a variety of systems, and the only machine I ever found which had problems with it is one with a built-in nVidia chipset, back in the Fedora Core 2 days, which was easily solved by switching to a different boot loader.

Yaz.

Re:User friendly?

[by Anonymous Coward]

> spits control back to whatever would load in the absence of GRUB having been installed.

The BIOS knows you want to boot from your hard drive, it does one simple thing to facilitate this, it loads the first 512 bytes from the drive into memory, and it tells the CPU "start executing here". Should the code in those 512 bytes fail, the bios has nothing further it can do, it only knows how to do one thing, grab the 512 bytes and let them execute.

You installed Stage 1 of GRUB in the MBR (first 512 bytes of the drive). When you installed it, you installed it over top of the 512 bytes that were Microsoft's MBR. This is what was there before GRUB was installed, and now it is gone, completely written over, and neither GRUB nor the bios can do anything about it.

I think you would probably like it if the grub installer put a backup copy of the Microsoft MBR somewhere else on the drive, and you would like stage 1 of GRUB to load and execute those if there is any problem. But, if there is an error loading those 512 bytes, absolutely nothing can be done.

There is a perfectly valid explanation for why stage 1 might fail and why the microsoft MBR doesn't.

Stage 1 of GRUB (installed in the mbr) has 1 job, load a file from your Ubuntu partition, /boot/grub/stage2. GRUB needs to do this because it is bigger than 512 bytes, so stage 2 contains all of the GRUB code that doesn't fit in the first 512. GRUB needs to be this larger than 512 bytes because it's a really advanced boot loader, it even understands file systems, which allows it to load configuration files, initrds, kernels, and modules by reading the file system, instead of having hard coded locations of those files location (by disk geometry) rammed into it. (this really helps when you update, replace, or change those files!)

The Microsoft MBR also has a simple job. It looks, at the partition table for partitions marked as bootable, takes the first one, loads the boot sector of that partition into memory, and executes it.

So stage 1 of GRUB and the Microsoft MBR really have a lot in common, as they are both 512 bytes they really do shit all, they just attempt to load more boot code off the drive and let it rip. The crucial difference here is WHERE on the drive they play with. Microsoft MBR reads the partition table and the boot sector of the partition marked bootable. GRUB stage 1 reads the location of /boot/grub/stage2, a location which is hard coded with the disk geometry location of this file. (stage 1 doesn't understand file systems).

As /boot/grub/stage2, the parition table, and the boot sector of your windows partition are completely differnt locations on the drive, it is entirely posible that GRUB stage 1 could have a problem, while the Microsoft MBR could not.

What could be different about these different locations on the drive?

If there was an error on the drive where /boot/grub/stage2 is located, but not in the partition table or boot sector of the Windows partition, one could fail where the other succeds.

Or, maybe the hard drive is fine in all locations, but the mechanism used by these two MBRs to access it is not behaving as it should. What is this mechanism? Our frequenly buggy friend, the BIOS. The BIOS implements a interface that the MBR can use to get its job done. Something like
load_sector_from_ide_drive( ide_channel, master_or_slave, block_number )

Assume neither MBR has any bugs in calling this interface, what if there is a problem with the implementation itself? What if the interface promises that a block_number=(location of /boot/grub/stage2) is loadable, but a bug in the implementation means it only works for block_number=(location of partition table) or block_number=(location of boot sector). Who wants to bet that there are BIOS out there that only get tested by the manufacturer on MBRs that only load play with the partition table and boot sectors of partiti

Re:What does Ubuntu offer that Debian doesn't?

[petermgreen (876956)]

What does Ubuntu offer that Debian doesn't?
a reasonablly predictable release schedule (a bit too fast for my liking in fact) and a bit of polish for some desktop related stuff.

as such it fills the gap between debian stable (slow unpredictable release process) and debian testing (constant upgrade treadmill with little in the way of security support)

What can be done with Ubuntu that I can't do with Debian?
if you feel like supporting debian testing/unstable then nothing. And with sarge for a while probablly not much.

However in the couple of years prior to the sarge release running woody was becoming more and more untenable as recent software simply wasn't getting tested with stuff that old. Sarge is ok for the moment but unless debian can get thier house in order and come up with a release every few years at least then we are going to run into this issue again.

Re:What does Ubuntu offer that Debian doesn't?

[Minwee (522556)]

Well, more naked people [ucc.asn.au] for one.

Re:Ubuntu release philosophy: A fatal flaw

[forlornhope (688722)]

Yeah, thats a common misconception. Ubuntu is not a snapshot of Debian Unstable. Multiverse is a snapshot of packages in Debian Unstable that are not in Universe, Main, or Restricted. Universe contains packages supported by the community, which is encouraged to work closely with Debian. Main and Restricted are both modules that are directly supported by Canonical. These packages are worked on heavily by employees of Canonical and while there is significant collaboration(some would like to see more, but thats a seperate debate) these packages are not just stabalized snapshots. Canonical puts a lot of time into Main and Restricted and you will often see versions of packages(and packages) that are in Ubuntu before they hit Debian. You can see that by the fact that Ubuntu Dapper currently has the prerelease gnome 2.13 while Debian still has 2.12. Please stop spreading this misinformation.