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Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released 272

LarryBoy writes "Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) alpha 4 was released Friday and Ars Technica has a look at what's new in the latest builds of Hardy Heron. 'Although many of the significant architectural features like PulseAudio and GIO are still in transitional stages and aren't fully functional yet, Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 4 is still very impressive. I'm a big fan of D-Bus and I'm very pleased to see it being adopted throughout the entire desktop stack in core components.'"
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Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released

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  • ndiswrapper (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Finallyjoined!!! ( 1158431 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:31PM (#22276614)
    Still doesn't work properly.
    But 8.04, it's bloody nice! I downloaded it this afternoon for a play :-) Ooops, p2p, must be illegal. Its great man!
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      I'm very put off by the selective-sudo nonsense that's supposedly going to be pervasive in Hardy. That can't possibly be supported by the processor without some super-weird extra abstraction that will just slow things down.
      • Re:ndiswrapper (Score:5, Informative)

        by 2sheds ( 78194 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:39PM (#22276708) Journal
        You mean PolicyKit? Surely granular user privileges are a good thing in this day and age? It's a D-Bus interface anyway, hardly super weird.
        • Re: ndiswrapper (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Dolda2000 ( 759023 ) <fredrik&dolda2000,com> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @09:17PM (#22278094) Homepage
          I may well agree that the effects of PolicyKit are a good thing, but I have to say that I am not immediately convinced of its D-Bus implementation. D-Bus may be fun and all, but I'm getting the feeling that Linux distributions are increasingly turning into D-Bus distributions. IIRC, Red Hat has even announced a project for a D-Bus based init replacement. I liked D-Bus when it was all about the desktop, and getting the occasional system level abstraction like HAL, BlueZ or possibly NetworkManager to speak to desktop programs, but now I feel it is beginning to replace core POSIX policies.

          Not that a D-Bus operating system couldn't possibly be good, but all I really want, quite honestly, is a good Unix system. More D-Bus at the system level is, for me, rather an argument to switch my laptop over to Debian instead, and then if Debian becomes GNU/DBus as well, I guess I'll switch to FreeBSD instead.

          • Re: ndiswrapper (Score:5, Interesting)

            by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@@@yahoo...com> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @10:06PM (#22278494) Homepage Journal
            POSIX simply doesn't support all the facilities required for a trusted (as in "Trusted IRIX") Operating System and, let's face it, security has for a long time been moving more towards MAC and not just for Linux. POSIX got into updating security surprisingly late in the game, and although there are patches for POSIX ACLs for Linux, I can't think of a single distro or mega-patch that includes POSIX security. I seem to recall Linux is deprecating some POSIX functionality, like POSIX ttys, and the kernel has always included unPOSIX-ish code where it is clear that the official POSIX syntax or semantics are carp (sic) or where support for other standards has been useful or expedient.

            D-Bus may not be the answer to everything, individual technologies rarely are, and it's not as if D-Bus was even the only user-level software bus commonly used in Linux, but it has interesting potential. Not sure how well it currently plays with clustering technology like MOSIX, or grid technology, but given the effort being poured into developing user-space software buses precisely for those, I imagine that's just a matter of time.

            Personally, I'd rather have more localized limited-purpose buses in any case where a general-purpose solution is slower and/or heavier. The code can't be that maintenance-intensive and too much abstraction must eventually pessimize the resulting code. Moore's Law is worthless if code gets slower at the same rate systems get faster. Nonetheless, any general-purpose abstract IPC that is easier to implement against than traditional mechanisms (RPC, CORBA, Unix sockets, System V messages, etc) must surely be beneficial - even if those end up being the mechanisms used under the hood. In fact, the more of those implemented and the better you could switch data between them, the more portable such a software bus becomes as well as the more optimal - to a point. The whole trend in programming is towards such pluggable solutions, it's surprising IPC is so far behind almost every other mechanism out there, and unless there are specific technological reasons to not use a given generic mechanisms (such as performance costs), you're already using so many that are not following some standard or other that it's absurd to discriminate against one just because it's not specifically POSIX.

    • Re:ndiswrapper (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cheater512 ( 783349 ) <nick@nickstallman.net> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:30PM (#22277126) Homepage
      There must be very very few things that you need ndiswrapper for these days.

      To be honest, I've never needed to touch it at all.
      I've been pretty lucky with wifi support (every wifi device I've bought has Linux drivers even though I didnt check before hand) but other hardware also works fine.

      I consider ndiswrapper a really dirty hack which is required in certain circumstances.
      I would never tell anyone to use it.
  • by crush ( 19364 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:32PM (#22276634)
    PulseAudio works great in Fedora 8. That's not really surprizing as the primary developer is a Red Hat employee (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering [fedoraproject.org] ). It's weird the way Ubuntu advocacy pieces rarely mention that most of the software which is touted as being part of the Ubuntu experience is usually programmed by Debian or Red Hat or Novell developers.
    • by cbart387 ( 1192883 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:39PM (#22276702)
      Business sense most like. It doesn't really matter where it originated as long as Ubuntu does it well. If they put emphasis that PulseAudio was originally developed for Fedora wouldn't that make it more likely that people would try out Fedora instead of Ubuntu. I'm sure more knowledgeable slashdotters could name packages for Fedora that were originally developed in Ubuntu or other distros. It's all a matter of perception but perception is important.
    • by andersa ( 687550 )
      Never heard of it before.. Audio framework of the week, as far as I am concerned. Next up? Phonon?
    • There's hardly anything that is actually Ubuntu-developed. (I think that the previous statement might release a shitstorm, I hope not)
      What they do is wrap it all up in a neat little package. Why not? If they're the wedge needed to widen the market for Linux-distributors, then that's great. I even got my father onto xUbuntu. Is the xfce implementation in Ubuntu anything but marginally different than other xfce implementations? (I don't even believe xUbuntu is on the official tree, but replace "xfce" with "Gn
  • Yet to be impressed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:32PM (#22276644)
    I am yet to be impressed because I cannot copy an Internet URL, paste it in a native GNOME application and have the application in question open the link. If the link points to a PDF document, some error is returned, even with the default PDF application installed. The only way out of this misery is to save the document onto the hard-disk. This is an non-starter GNOME folks, something MUST be done.
    • Why not just click on the link?

      Seriously. I would like to know, how copy&paste is faster/better than just clicking on the link.
    • by pizzach ( 1011925 ) <pizzach.gmail@com> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:57PM (#22277402) Homepage
      Oh! Oh! Oh! This in the gnome complaints thread isn't it!? Hey Gnome, why don't you do something about the foot? It stinks! No, I mean literally dammit!

      I did good, didn't I?
    • by nurb432 ( 527695 )
      Not to start a flame war, but i can do that in KDE just fine. I would imagine GNOME can too, and perhaps your configuration is hosed?
    • by Enahs ( 1606 )
      Try the Kubuntu release.
  • Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by snarfies ( 115214 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:36PM (#22276672) Homepage
    Call me back when you have at least a beta. Even then I wouldn't think that front-page worthy. Save that for the final release.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why would we? What makes you think we give a damn if you know or not?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:37PM (#22276682)
    This was on slashdot for a while: Hardy Heron Alpha4: A Glimpse into the Future of Ubuntu [techthrob.com]; it gives a better look into the new applications included with HH, and mentions some other changes not included in the Ars Technica rewview.
  • Congratulations! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BeeBeard ( 999187 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:40PM (#22276722)
    Big congratulations goes to the Ubuntu team for sticking to their release schedules, and getting their fairly solid alphas and betas out there for users to bang on well in advance. Like many others, I thought that Ubuntu Linux was just another flavor-of-the-month distribution, but the tenacity, reliability, and graciousness of the Ubuntu community has proved us all wrong.

    -A Longtime Gentoo User
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Yes, I'm a longtime gentoo user too and have recently switched my desktop (home) and workstation (office) to Ubuntu.

      It's not to say that Ubuntu is better then Gentoo or anything else. It's just that I think my day to day goals have changed. Where as before I had more time to tinker and play, Gentoo was so much fun. But now I've switched jobs and life is getting in the way, I need to get "work" done and pass on the tinkering.

      After switching to Ubuntu, it's nice to just have little things "work". Not like
    • by caluml ( 551744 )

      Like many others, I thought that Ubuntu Linux was just another flavor-of-the-month distribution, but the tenacity, reliability, and graciousness of the Ubuntu community has proved us all wrong.
      Or maybe, it's just the billionaire who runs Ubuntu.
  • by Minwee ( 522556 ) <dcr@neverwhen.org> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:43PM (#22276744) Homepage
    I still think that calling this the Happy Harry Hard-On [mycal.net] edition of Ubuntu would have been a much better move.
    • You've got to admit it's a pretty easy slip of the tongue to say "Hairy Hard-on" instead of "Hardy Heron". IN the long run, if Ubuntu is looking for better corporate penetration, perhaps they should look for better release names in the future. Perhaps a poll of the users would yield some suggestions.
  • by sayfawa ( 1099071 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @06:57PM (#22276866)
    The warning to not use alpha releases on production machines is a bit more severe this time. So watch out.

    Snipped from the release notes:
    Nautilus can behave erratically, especially in trash operations. Refrain from operating on valuable files with this version. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/185756 [launchpad.net]
  • by eddy ( 18759 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:07PM (#22276936) Homepage Journal

    In particular, Nautilus will now queue up long file transfer operations and display them in a single window rather than spawning a separate window for each file transfer operation.

    Please tell me this means that file operations will actually queue to be run in sequence, saving us from disk and cache trashing slowing things down? With "run", "pause", "cancel" on each individual transfer? Pretty please?

    • If you look at the screen shot you see two different threads running in parallel, so I guess we are currently out of luck. It would be great if they could make them run in sequence indeed. Nothing breaks down hard disk speeds and responsiveness like two simultaneous copies. Of course, you might want to check which devices are being used by a copy. If you have a copy reading/writing /dev/hda and another copy reading/writing /dev/hdb, you might still want to run those in parallel. But even if they cannot do t
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Cato ( 8296 )
        Actually it's pretty complex for a GUI tool to figure out actual disk impact of its operations - it needs to consider

        - which volumes are mounted under which mount points (quite easy, but then calculate that for all files transferred, not just root of each transfer)

        - which volumes are really LVM2 logical volumes, and how those are mapped to volume groups and then physical volumes (LVM is default in Fedora and maybe also Ubuntu, I always install it explicitly)

        - is RAID in use, at level of software RAID (Linux
  • I love the integration and simplicity of the gnome interface on Ubuntu and have turned into a gnome user over the years when I run Linux.

    However with the fiasco with Suse, Micorosoft, patents, .NET, and Miguel supporting ooxml over ODF I am begining to feel uncomfortable running Gnome and wonder about ulterior motives. Doesn't Miguel work for SuSE? Didn't SuSE just cripple their own Samba version in order to sell more copies of Windows as an AD controller?

    Kde 4.0 supposed to be a rapid improvement and Kubun
    • >Also Dbus is not friendly on laptops as the event model prevents many models from going to a power saving mode wasting battery power. I wonder if this has been resolved.

      I can't find any mention of that anywhere; care to expand on this?
    • by ricegf ( 1059658 ) on Saturday February 02, 2008 @07:42PM (#22277240) Journal

      Kde 4.0 supposed to be a rapid improvement and Kubuntu is supposed to be alot more polished and integrated

      Actually, KDE 4.0 is more of a beta quality [kde.org] release (like Mac OS/X 10.0 or pre-SP1 Vista) - it's 4.1 or so that'll really be ready for daily use by normal users. Unfortunately, Hardy falls at an awkward time with respect to 4.0 (or vice versa) - 4.0 isn't ready for long term support, but 3.5 isn't likely to be relevant for 3 long years. As a result, while Ubuntu 8.04 will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Kubuntu 8.04 will not be [kubuntu.org].

      I agree with your opinion of Gnome (I use it myself), and with your assessment of KDE 4 (I look forward to trying it out - looks great so far!). And I'm very suspicious that Mono contains Microsoft-patented technology, and believe free software developers should avoid it until the title is clear. But that's just my $0.02 worth (and it seems to be worth less every day...) I don't believe any critical part of Gnome is dependent on Mono, however.

      • Unfortunately, Hardy falls at an awkward time with respect to 4.0 (or vice versa) - 4.0 isn't ready for long term support, but 3.5 isn't likely to be relevant for 3 long years. As a result, while Ubuntu 8.04 will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Kubuntu 8.04 will not be.

        This is complete rubbish, and is a poor decision from Canonical (not the first, I might add). The desktop that should have been in 8.04 is KDE 3.5.x, and many KDE developers have stated that KDE 3.5 will continue to be supported. Cano

    • SuSE != Gnome

      Miguel is a Gnome dev, but he is not the leader or even a leader of Gnome.

      Mono is not a core component of Gnome. Some of the most well known programs that use Mono are Banshee (Music player, not the default), Beagle (desktop search, there are several others), and F-Spot (Photo Manager, gthumb and Digikam are possible replacements). You can have a fully functional Gnome desktop without Mono.

      As far as d-bus issues, unless those are actually fixed, KDE 4 will not be an improvement over Gnome, as i
  • I read totem in the next gnome has the ability to act as a mythtv frontend. It mentioned watching recordings and even live tv. I'm wondering how it works exactly. Does one see the full gui?
    • What's wrong with 'mythfrontend' that Totem needs to get involved?

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by CnlPepper ( 140772 )
        How about the fact that mythfontend, stupidly doesn't have a "run-in-window" option. I'd like to watch TV in a small, movable window that I can put in the corner while working/reading. Mythfrontend doesn't do this nicely.
      • What's wrong with 'mythfrontend' that Totem needs to get involved?

        It does a terrible job of playing back high-definition video. I have a two-tuner Mythtv box with a standard-def and high-def tuner. I know my system is powerful enough to playback high-definition video because there are no problems using xine, mplayer, and totem. When playing back HD content in mythfrontend on the same machine however, there are frequent pauses in the video playback. This is a widely reported problem. Being able to use Totem as a form of frontend would be nice, as I currently have to open

  • I've seen Ubuntu break itself to an unbootable state three separate times on three different systems. I've never seen that on any distribution. I still use it.. but much more of this and I'll be looking elsewhere.

    Also, the latest release seems to have broken wireless, at least for the Intel IPW 3945 chipset in my laptop. I had to downgrade to 7.04, and all is well again.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by robzon ( 981455 )
      Please file a bug report if you haven't already.
    • My OS experiences always seem to run counter to everyone elses..... I've run Redhat, Fedora and SuSe, and now Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon) and it's the most stable and easiest to configure OS I've used. Better yet, I've STILL got my Windows 98 install on the other partition on this computer -I play some old strategy games on it- and it's never even sneezed at me. Of course, for the last 4 years, zone alarm has been set to disable all internet connectivity on that partition..... And yeah, I'm running old hardwar
  • Ubuntu seems to have been great at attracting non-computer people to linux. All but 1 mac in my classroom (of 9 computers) is running ubuntu, and students love it. Ubuntu isn't even an open source project, but a repository and a list of preffered applications that are meant to work together. Beyond that, the only thing that makes it different from other distros is Shuttleworth's $30 million dollar backing in the case that a necessary component doesn't get made (so far none of which has been spent) and the a
  • by multi io ( 640409 ) <olaf.klischat@googlemail.com> on Saturday February 02, 2008 @11:48PM (#22279222)
    ...and while nobody is going to use its native interface, maybe we can use it to get rid of the Alsa Mess[tm] by burying it under a hopefully less messy stack [wikimedia.org] of 5 userspace modules that may introduce 2 seconds of latency, but provide an emulated /dev/dsp on top! Sure, you have to run the OSS-using app under an obscure wrapper [launchpad.net] named "padsp", which probably means you'll have to run the whole X session under padsp and hope it doesn't crash too often, but oh well... :-P

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