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Ubuntu 6.10 is Out

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu Oct 26, 2006 09:54 AM
from the say-ubuntu-ten-times-fast dept.
cloudmaster writes "Apparently they were watching me to see when I downloaded the 6.10-rc release isos, as I did that last night, and the full release happened this morning. :) Neat stuff, including Firefox 2.0, Gnome 2.16, myth 0.20, faster booting thanks to upstart (sort of a replacement for init, among others), etc. The announcement and download pages are up. I've got *my* torrent running..."
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[+] Upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft a "Nightmare" 529 comments
Theovon writes, "It's only been two days since the announcement of the official release of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and the fallout has been very interesting to watch. By and large, fresh installs of Edgy tend to go well. Many people report improved performance over Dapper, improved stability, better device support, etc. A good showing. But what I find really interesting is the debacle that it has been for people who wanted to do an 'upgrade' from Dapper (6.06). Installing OS upgrades has historically been fraught with problems, but previous Ubuntu releases, many other Linux distros, and MacOS X have done surprisingly well in the recent past. But not Edgy." Read on for the rest of Theovon's detailed report.
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  • by fracai (796392) on Thursday October 26 2006, @09:58AM (#16592786)
    gksudo "update-manager -c"
  • Firefox? (Score:4, Funny)

    by jdavidb (449077) * on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:02AM (#16592836) Homepage Journal

    It's got Firefox 2.0? I wanted IceWeasel!

  • by vain gloria (831093) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:02AM (#16592842) Homepage
    I say, here's fun! Official word from Mozilla [typepad.com] on why Ubuntu shipped with Firefox branded Firefox, rather than Iceweasel.

    Plaudits to the Ubuntu guys for getting this release out so quickly. Wonder if I should stick with 6.06 and its LTS or upgrade?
  • Debian? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Klaidas (981300) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:07AM (#16592896) Homepage
    Why is there a Debian icon here? Yeah, I know, "ubuntu is based on debian", etc. But if the distro is THAT popular, you might wanna get an icon for Ubuntu too.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:11AM (#16592940)
    Upgrade from Dapper via the net too around 1 hour (DSL) and went very smooth. During the updating process the system worked fine, but some strange things started to happen due to new versions of apps and libraries slowly filtering in (e.g. funny fonts, missing icons).

    After the reboot ...

    Dapper was already a fast system, Edgy feels even faster. In particular, bott time is shorter, the Gnome menus come up quicker. The Murrine GTK+ theme I had installed from outside of the normal repositories was broken. Fonts were not fully hinted (looked smeared) in Firefox and gnome-terminal; this was fixed by explicitly switching to full hinting in the fonts preferences. These have been the only regressions I've noticed so far.

    The new Firefox 2 is certainly nice, e.g. spell-checking in text fields, not slow as molasses anymore on framed pages, etc. Departs further from GTK look & feel with the (literally) shiny new tabs. Epiphany has acquired adblocking capabilities, but is still not installed by default.
  • by Reapman (740286) <tdoerksen@gmail.cCURIEom minus physicist> on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:15AM (#16592984)
    Now that I finished installing 4 Ubuntu systems this week this would happen...
  • by karot (26201) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:18AM (#16593012)

    faster booting thanks to upstart (sort of a replacement for init, among others)

    I just had a look at "upstart" and some of its configuration documentation, and while I understand "traditional" rc script processes (such as sysvinit, and the variations on that) I cannot see how upstart will speed anything up. It still seems to be a serialised startup process, and the documentation does not make it clear how to specify startup dependencies ("IP before NTP", or "spamd before sendmail"), so there is no implied optimisation behind-the-scenes by using parallel startup.

    Have I missed something, or is this just a move to an event-driven RC process "because I can" ?

    • by diegocgteleline.es (653730) on Thursday October 26 2006, @11:19AM (#16594016)
      "It still seems to be a serialised startup process"

      It is. For Ubuntu edgy, a "compatibility layer" has been implemented to allow upstart run the old sysv /etc/init.d scripts

      This is because changing everything in a single release was too much. For the next release, they'll replace the old scripts with true upstart scripts and then the switch will be complete (and still there'll be compatibility for the unported sysv scripts available in extra packages)
    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2006, @11:45AM (#16594438)
      It still seems to be a serialised startup process, and the documentation does not make it clear how to specify startup dependencies ("IP before NTP", or "spamd before sendmail")

      From the documentation, it looks like you can do exactly this, by specifying that spamd be started when and before sendmail is started. You can also have sendmail start whenever spamd has finished starting. It looks to give you the ability to inject dependencies in either direction. Example: If sendmail is already installed and configured to start at system boot, the spamd installer just needs to add "start on sendmail/start" to it's own startup script, and upstart will call it before calling sendmail's startup script. Or you can go the other direction, and have sendmail's script use "start on spamd/started" to run sendmail's startup script after spamd's startup script finishes running.

      However, the most useful aspect seems to be the fact that it can process events at any time, not just startup/shutdown. Such as starting an iPod sync daemon only when an iPod is connected, and stopping it when the iPod is removed.
  • With Strigi! (Score:5, Informative)

    by oever (233119) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:23AM (#16593078) Homepage
    The universe now contains the desktop search with the fastest file-indexer: Strigi [sf.net]! This is a huge improvement over Beagle in terms of resource usage and with the added ability to search for files no matter how deeply nested in packages, archives or mail, it's clearly the best file searching tool for Linux.
  • Et tu, Kubuntu? (Score:5, Informative)

    by CheeseTroll (696413) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:38AM (#16593304)
    Kubuntu 6.10 has also been released. New features + installation/upgrade instructions are here: http://kubuntu.org/announcements/6.10-release.php [kubuntu.org]
  • Cake? (Score:5, Funny)

    by neaorin (982388) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:40AM (#16593346)
    I guess the cake sent to them by the Vista team got lost in delivery.
  • by Billly Gates (198444) on Thursday October 26 2006, @11:30AM (#16594194) Homepage Journal
    Its not ready yet. I have summarized my experience here 2 days ago. [slashdot.org]

    Initramfs has been updated several times a day and reports of usb drives double mounting, not mounting, and randomly unmounting are quite huge, many wifi cards no longer work, multiple midi files can crash xmms, firefox 2.0 randomly crashes, and other issues means its not ready yet in my book.

    Also in my journal I mentioned gpart crashed during a resizing of my ntfs partition. That was quite scary but I did not lose anything. According to launchpad it has not been fixed yet so Windows users beware.

    Ubuntu is my favorite and one of the most stable distro's out there. However I highly advise ubuntu users to wait a few weeks before upgrading to this version.

  • by suggsjc (726146) on Thursday October 26 2006, @12:17PM (#16595010) Homepage
    In the grand scheme of things, what does it really mean to release a new version other than just having a continually increasing number? Why make it such a big deal?

    I ask this seriously and also in jest. Why not just have
    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
    give you the latest and greatest? There has already been discussion of the "best" way to go about upgrading (dist-update, whatever). If instead of having repositories that were "version" specific, why not just have "current" repositories. Then as *everything* progresses, it all gets updated along the way?

    Is it just the dependencies issue? Or am I missing something more? Just seems like since Ubuntu is aimed at making it the most user-friendly distro, "version" updates could follow suit.
    • Re:Can I (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rik Sweeney (471717) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:02AM (#16592840) Homepage
      Can I now dist-upgrade my Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy?

      I think so, I was going to do (on the command line)

      sudo sed -e 's/\sdapper/ edgy/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list

      sudo apt-get update

      sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

      * Go to bed / work *

      Which will update my sources list, update the repository and then upgrade. At least, that's what I think it'll do. If anyone has any corrections then let us know.
      • Re:Can I (Score:5, Informative)

        by grazzy (56382) <grazzy@@@quake...swe...net> on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:11AM (#16592938) Homepage Journal
        Also the documentation recommends running sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
        Thats because if the first command fails you shouldnt run the second for whatever reason.

        Ubuntu is the next best thing since sliced bread, and everyone should atleast try it out. I upgraded my 5.10 (no idea how I managed to install that) the other day to 6.06 this way - it went without a hickup. I love ubuntu :P
        • Re:Can I (Score:5, Interesting)

          by grazzy (56382) <grazzy@@@quake...swe...net> on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:14AM (#16592970) Homepage Journal
          A small success story;

          The company that I hire my office from has been running redhat for ages, they're getting problems installing their in-house software to the newer versions of redhat because they are using cups instead of the older lp/lpr/lprng systems. Knowing this I started synaptic (the ubuntu package manager), searched for LPRNG with one of the senior guys behind my shoulder. Choosed to install LPRNG, synaptic automaticlly disabled cups and change the appropriate settings. 15 minutes later we were printing useing their sed-scripts from the 80's again.

          I think I can safely say that I singlehanded arranged for a bunch of new ubuntu installs with that 20 minutes of my time.
      • Re:Can I (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:36AM (#16593276)
        I updated Kubuntu from 6.06 yesterday (as detailed in the RC press release) and after rebooting the system stop working (frozen at the end of the boot process).
        Should it happen to you, I did this:

        1. reset
        2. hit ESC when prompted at boot
        3. select safe mode from the menu
        4. run "startx" on the commnad prompt. KDE should start.
        5. Update the system with Adept (system > package manager).
        6. reboot.

        Everything is fine now.
    • by beezly (197427) <beezly@@@beezly...org...uk> on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:42AM (#16593406) Homepage

      It doesn't take much to find out via the ubuntu wiki - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInit [ubuntu.com] has lots of information on the whole implementation.

      With regards to launchd, that page says;

      The four candidates were Solaris SMF, Apple's launchd, the LSB initserv/chkconfig tools and initNG.

      The first two of these suffer from inescapable licence problems, which is relatively unfortunate as both have features that are somewhat appealing though neither quite fix our problems. Having whichever system we use being adopted as a Linux-wide standard would not be possible if we chose either of these two systems.

      and also from discussion further down the page;

      NabLa: [WWW] Apple's launchd has been [WWW] released recently under the Apache license. Would that resolve those "inescapable licence problems"? Looks like a very interesting possibility now.

      • ScottJamesRemnant: it still doesn't meet our requirements, so would be only a base for our own work. We've already implemented enough that it'd be a backwards step to start again based on launchd. Also the new launchd licence may not be GPL compatible, so it would still not be ideal
      • jec : I think that the licence (apache 2.0) is GPL compatible. But if work is already advanced on your own solution, then great! Just hope that Redhat/SuSE/Debian will adopt it...
      • ThomMay: it's not - [WWW] the FSF mark it as incompatible.
    • by StressGuy (472374) on Thursday October 26 2006, @10:45AM (#16593450)
      If you pay peanuts, you get elephants...you only get monkeys if you're willing to shell out some serious banannas. Rabbits can be had if you're willing to come up with the lettuce and, if you've got the cheese, you'll attract the mice - who will scare away the elephants you only paid peanuts for in the first place.

      On the other hand, if I need to get rid of an ass, I'll just tie a carrot to a stick and lead him away.