Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta Released

vivaoporto writes "The Beta version of the popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.04, was released today. Codenamed Feisty Fawn, the CD images can be downloaded from the Canonical Servers, and the final version is due to be released next month. Get it while it's hot! Read more about it on the official wiki."

I've been waiting for this one

[rnmartinez]

I must admit that Windows Vista almost got me. Its not even the eye candy, its just the thought of looking at something different from XP. I can't wait to go from 6.10 to 7.04, I've really enjoyed ubuntu since I siwtched to it from Debian. I hope that wireless and 3D is a bit easier in this release. I also heard that there is an applet that helps install media codecs, that should really come in handy too (Although I think easybuntu does this too)

still a long way to go

[eobanb]

still a long way to go in terms of usability. A friend of mine recently installed 6.10 for the first time. He's basically never used Linux before. I briefly explained how to use Synaptic. He got the hang of things for a while, but then he interrupted a dpkg process when Synaptic was running by hitting the power button. I have no idea why he did this, but you probably know what happened...he tried to run Synaptic later on and it said 'you have to run dpkg update -a to fix these errors!' or something along those lines. Big mistake number one: it told the user to type in commands at the shell. Big mistake number two: it didn't tell him to use sudo.

He was immediately stuck. He even figured out how to access the shell, but he didn't understand why it kept saying that he needed superuser privileges to continue. The problem with these kinds of things is that if even one little glitch happens like this, the user gets stuck and then usually gives up and goes back to Windows. It has to be perfect. It has to be flawless. Or else it won't attract brand new users.

Re:new name, please!

[chebucto]

How about calling it 'Version 7', and forgoing the use of a code-name for a publicly-developed project? Though, I must say 'Feisty Fawn' is better than some of the other zany names they've used. Hoary Hedgehog and Dapper Drake are especially lame.

Newbie Question

[pinkocommie]

I'm installing Ubuntu (Kubuntu actually, a KDE fan) for the first time, looking to migrate from SUSE. I got a copy of 6.10 and thought I'd use that and then do an in place upgrade to 7.04 next month (from what I read online it was a matter of issuing a single command). What do you guys recommend? A straight up 7.04 beta or 6.10 followed by the upgrade? I'm somewhat of a newbie with ~nix (but with relatively standard hardware). Thanks

Re:new name, please!

[ArcherB]

It's hard enough for me accept the name "Ubuntu", let alone their release names. I wonder if they could have a contest to actually make the version names somehow worse. I'm sure I would get a lot of street cred with the other IT guys when I tell them I run "Feisty Fawn". I'll have to make sure to wear my neckerchief...

Are you running the "Stoned Beaver" [wikipedia.org] "Out of Detox" or "Feisty Dunnart" kernel?

(in other words, code names suck, but there is no way around them)

Re:still a long way to go

[LiENUS]

Windows has those same issues, ever gotten the error message about the registry size being too small? How long do you think it takes a user to figure that one out on their own? Plus Ubuntu has great user support on irc.freenode.net in #ubuntu.

Re:still a long way to go

[stim]

Its not really a long way to go. Ubuntu has already gotten way more usable and intuitive than Windows is or ever will be (try walking a noob though a registry edit). The thing is there is a double standard when it comes to linux, and that is that it needs to be perfect. Linux is and always be a work in progress, allways changing to incorporate the newest and greatest thing. This will always leave some little quarks in some of the process. It probably should have just put sudo in front in the error message, but do we in IT really have such a strong desire to completely phase ourselves out of end user support? In other words, GET YOUR HANDS OUT MY POCKETS!

mobo RAID support?

[postmortem]

Today, more and more people opt in for using home RAID arrays, primarily from free chipset controllers that implement RAID 0,1, (5) capabilities in software. It is free performance upgrade for anybody with more than one hard drive.

For long time, no Linux distro would support this 'winRAID'. Then dmraid project was created at RedHat, and soon after, Fedora Core 5,6, SUSE 10.2, and RHEL 5 have installer support for it.

Last I've heard that future Ubuntu releases will contain support for dmraid... does anybody can verify that is the case, that is Ubuntu 7.04 can be installed on RAID0 device created on onboard RAID controller?

Re:still a long way to go

[FishWithAHammer]

The difference is that Windows fixed that problem. XP and later have no registry size limit.

And here's a tip that really should be a clue-batting, but I'm feeling nice: telling end users to use IRC for help is the dumbest fucking thing you can do. And for the record--with a few exceptions, the people in #ubuntu are dumb as a box of rocks. Completely useless for almost any questions. (This is not a slight against the half-dozen helpful people on the channel--just the 400+ who suck.)

Re:Some thoughts on Feisty

[Rutulian]

The network-manager gains zeroconf support in this release, but there's still no WPA options in the network-manager. I thought that was coming in this release? I have network-manager-gnome installed, but it doesn't look anything like this.

Hmmm, not sure what you mean by this because zeroconf isn't related to network-manager as far as I know. Anyway, your network-manager applet should look just like your screenshot. Are you sure you are running the applet? Type nm-applet at the terminal. Ubuntu ships another wireless applet with the same icon, but it isn't the network-manager applet. So make sure you are actually running the network-manager applet. And WPA configuration has been there for at least a year, so you should be able to see it unless there are driver issues with your wireless card.

This is a true story

[9gezegen]

Two weeks ago, one of my friends called me. His in-laws were visiting them. Since they are Turkish, they will stay like 6 months with their daughter in US. In order to pass time, they often visit the local library to use internet and read Turkish newspapers.

Now my friend found an old computer from his company (Pentium III, 750 Mhz, 20GB harddisk) that had Windows 2000 and thought that could save his in-laws a trip to the library. He connected it to his brand new cable connection (without any router). I had warned him earlier that he should at least install a firewall before connecting it to the internet. Of course he didn't listen me and it was the next day after the first run that he called me. Guess what, the computer started showing spam messages (I think that was the messanger bug), so he run an old antivirus program all day and couldn't find anything (the program never finished actually).

Now, he was wondering how he can fix the problem. I said either use a free anti virus or let me install linux. Since he wanted to test drive Linux he opted for it. So we made a deal, his in-laws were going to prepare delicious Turkish food, and meanwhile I was going to install Kubuntu 6.10.

At the beginning, the boot started fine. However, as soon as X11 started the screen went dark. I waited 15 minutes or so since that was the first time I was using Kubuntu 6.10 installer and I thought the machine was doing something. But it turned out that I had downloaded live cd (which had the installer). So spent an hour or so trying a few times, and trying install without going to the live system. I should have read little more, since apparently live cd doesn't have the regular installation options I was expecting to see (they had another CD for that). Anyway, after an hour or so, I had my euroka moment when I pressed Cltr-Alt-F1. Wholla, text console was there. Now, at least I knew machine was up but X11 had problems. So I changed X11 configuration on the live system to vesa and X started working. With the main bottleneck solved, I quickly started installation. The installer was kind enough to ask even if I want to create a partition for windows and let it stay there. My friend just said remove everything, so I just go and selected a few options and the machine was ready in 10 minutes or so. However, when it booted the next time from the hard-drive, it was again X11 with problems so I just modified xconfig file to switch it back to vesa driver. Now, I had a working machine with 800x600 resolution. A quick internet search showed me that the Matrox G250 driver that comes with the driver had a bug. So ubuntu forums had a discussion where somebody recompiled bug-free debian driver for matrox. After installing that, I had 1600x1200 resolution without any problem. Next hour spent on eye-candies. I installed firefox, created bookmarks to the Turkish newspapers, created some bookmarks to in-laws mail providers etc, added some weather and add blocking extensions. I also changed to KDE and Firefox themes to noia (to their dismay, since initially they wanted to have familiar XP interface which my heart didn't let me do it. I complained so much that they let me use Noia :)).

Anyway, to make the long story short, the only think they wanted out-of box was Internet Explorer since some sites explicitly required it and Acrobat Reader. It didn't took very long to install IE (thanks to IEs4Linux) and Adobe already had acroread ready. My friend's wife needed an office program, so the obvious choice was OpenOffice. The final step was the installation of Flash. I also showed them how to use Adept so that they can install whatever they want very easily, and just added a button to kill firefox or IE , in case they had problems.

Since then they are very happy with their system. My main concern which was running KDE on Pentium 3 750Mhz machine with 256MB ram was unfounded. The system is very responsive. I was wondering how long it would stay without crashing, and asked them to let the compute

This will be awesome because...

[purpleraison]

I just installed one of the betas on my old Toshiba Satellite laptop, and everything works perfectly for me. In fact an odd finding is that I get BETTER reception with my wi-fi card than when it was running Windows XP.

My feelings on the current releases of Ubuntu is that it is getting VERY close to making Linux a potential alternative for average Windows users. The only shortcoming that still exists is that installing applications that are not distributed through Ubuntu is still confusing for 'normal' folks (ie. people who have no background with Linux). It would be nice if Linux would adapt a single universal installer for all Linux apps -- that would bring Linux a lot of people.

Anyways, keep your eyes on this release -- it is nice :D

Re:Damnit...

[PopeRatzo]

You guys are scaring me. I'm in the process of putting a system together for UbuntuStudio (when it comes out) and now I'm hearing you saying stuff's broken. What's up with that?

I'm dedicated to making an earnest effort with Linux for professional audio/video production. I don't want to be hearing about typos in config files and such.

Look, I can still use the case, mobo, drives and memory I've gotten for this UbuntuStudio project for something else. Will someone here please tell me if I'm wasting my time or not? I don't expect installing and configuring Linux to be as easy as OSX, but I need to know whether this thing is ready for prime time, or at least ready to use as a secondary platform for audio.

Is there anyplace I can find all these little problems I'm going to have to deal with to get Ubuntu to work? Or will these things even matter? I would like dual-monitor support, by the way. Do I stay or do I go?

Re:still a long way to go

[Bogtha]

he tried to run Synaptic later on and it said 'you have to run dpkg update -a to fix these errors!' or something along those lines. Big mistake number one: it told the user to type in commands at the shell. Big mistake number two: it didn't tell him to use sudo.

The thing is, everyone knows someone who's pretty good with Windows and can help them with their problems. Five minutes with Google usually does the trick.

When I put dpkg superuser Ubuntu into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", it took me straight to a page [ubuntuforums.org] where somebody had exactly the same problem and was shown exactly what to do, with a link to a tutorial as well.

How is "five minutes with Google" not enough in the Ubuntu case?

Re:Damnit...

[evilviper]

Can you actually sell ubuntu CDs that you download?

You can sell GPL'd binaries, so long as you provide source code as well.

That can mean you wait for someone to ask, then you ship them a CD of the source code for $2, or you can make it easy and just include source code on the CD, or on another separate CD along with the binary CD.

Distros usually make it easy, by providing ISOs or packages of the source code for download. Fortunately for you, Ubuntu is no different: ftp://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/dapper/main/sour ce/ [ubuntu.com]

<RANT>
IMHO, Open Source on Windows isn't going to get much traction because of this... The GPL requires you provide source with your binaries, but most GPL'd Windows projects don't provide a source package... only binaries, and you have to go upstream, or look around for CVS/SVN instructions to create your own snapshot. Whether it's ClamWin, Cygwin, cdrdao, or most anything else, you've got lots of work to do to find the source code.

Re:still a long way to go

[xtracto]

1A. it can detect the problem well enough to tell the user what needs to be done... so why doesn't it just ask if it is ok to do that and then do it itself so the user doesn't have to figure out how to type in a command

That is something I have always wondered about Synaptic and the dpkg -i ??'xxasdf issue, he tells *me* to do it, and it is the first thing to try... why dont it just *do it*... it is not for security reasons (it already has the gksudo credentials)! just fucking do it!, if it does not fix the problem then throw the error message and be done with it.

Oh, and the other think I do not like is that the error messages are usually "hidden" in some text file. It would be better if there was some kind of big red screen telling the user there was an error and not die silently (and write something the logfile, or worst yet, coredump).

I like Ubuntu, I use it in a secondary machine I got from the thrash... granted I almost dont use it (I tried installing in my notebook but not all the hardware worked), I will give version 7 a try but I am sure there will be some issue (with Linux there is always an issue).

By the way, why is it 7.04 ? why not just 7? that, and as other people already said, what with the gay naming? it is okay if developers want to name it as they want while they are doing it, but I hard a hard time remembering the name of the 6 release, and then it was not 6 but 6.06 !!!! it is difficult to find help to some specific issues (specially for newbies) if you have such weird and inconsistent names...

Re:Damnit...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny though, their technique works, from a marketing perspective. Everyone hates on Debian for only making releases when it's truly stable, while Ubuntu, with its timely releases full of beta packages, has taken the Linux world by storm.