Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out 755
Many readers are sending the news that Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon has been released. Download options include mirrors and torrents. Wired has a review based on the release candidate: "Gamers and hardcore media hounds may still feel left out... but we found playing music and watching movies in the new Ubuntu to be every bit as pleasant as it is under OS X or Windows... Wi-Fi, printing, my digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after installation — no drivers or other software required... I did have to install additional codecs to get MP3 and Windows Media Audio support."
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Amarok + www.last.fm account = tons of great music + great music recommendations!
Has support from Dell and Novell (Score:5, Interesting)
It's got a slick UI and the package manager is well done.
Add in support from Dell [dell.com].
All that is missing now is a really awesome developer environment [microsoft.com].
Re:Just do (n00b question).... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just do .... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ubuntu Server needs work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Win, win, win, win...
It's a bit pricey retail ($54), but comes with a 300 page manual, and the coupon "DOM3-STARDOCK" will get you 20% off until November 15th, making it quite reasonable..
I'm not affiliated with them, it's just pretty much the only game I bother to play these days.
Re:The summary contradicts itself (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, let's briefly go over the list of players I own that will support MP3 without any additional h4x0ring required (i.e., the format can be played using minimal effort and official software):
Ok, and here's what supports OGG:
OGG is really catching on, isn't it?
Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tech specs on Apple's site:
Mac system requirements
* Mac OS X v10.4.8 or later
* iTunes 7.4 or later5
Windows s
* Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later
* iTunes 7.4 or later
I don't see a Linux option.
I don't see a "non iTunes" option.
And apple sells the whole package as they do with everything they sell.
Off topic----
Note: I am an Apple user. I have both a MacBookPro and a Debian server. I tried for the longest time to get stuff onto my iPod from the debian server since that's where my music resides. I couldn't find any command line programs to do it. I even had conceptualized a nice little bash script that after I plugged my iPod in, I'd run it and it'd sync everything. I gave up and just use iTunes over an NFS share over Wireless, sure it takes a while but I set it before I go to bed. (Initial sync was over ethernet).
Where are all the linux developers making nice stable non 'flair' programs? Why can't someone make a nice stable cli interface to the iPod and then write a GUI wrapper around that? I've been looking *forever* for CLI RSS torrent grabber. It doesn't even have to be a program, just a simple script will due. OS X has a nice program called TVShows.app, it's just a nice GUI wrapped around a ruby script that reads an XML file. I tried but the script doesn't run under Debian. Shiny programs are nice to keep up with the OSX/Vista crowd but what happened to the developers that make good dependable programs for the command line?
Compiz and Beryl (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd been running Vista and it was a disaster. I have an Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, which doesn't support DX10, so even when I got Bioshock I never really benefitted from that aspect of Vista. Long story short, Vista turned me off so much that I now dual boot XP and Ubuntu, with the idea that I'd use Ubuntu as sort of a project to noodle around with, getting used to Linux in anticipation of XP's future abandonment.
Two weeks in I've been pleasantly surprised by how well Ubuntu works and how much I don't need XP. Everything non-game related works great, and I've even made inroads towards weaning my girlfriend off of iTunes. Wine runs EVE well after some mucking about with settings. I still need XP for Bioshock, but HL2 seems to work fine. I have yet to try BF2142 and I have some older games I'd like to try out but so far I'd characterize it as a net success.
So yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that games are important, but people who ask me for recommendations as to software tend to be friends/family that will subsequently ask me to install and maintain said software, and on that basis I'd much rather set them up with Ubuntu than XP or Vista. With my admittedly limited experience with Linux, I still like that when things go wrong in Linux they seem to go wrong for obvious reasons and be relatively straightforward to fix, where Windows does so much mysterious crap in the background it seems like problems just arise out of the ether. I get the impression that extended use is not intended use, unlike with Windows.
As it stands now, I no longer consider XP to be my main os. I basically consider Ubuntu my "serious" os, and the XP partition as essentially the same as my Wii: a console for a few specific games.
DebTorrent (Score:3, Interesting)
System upgrade - why not using a torrent? (Score:2, Interesting)
But it doesn't download using a BitTorrent, does it? So who's going to pay for all the bandwidth? It freaks me out..
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out Cowon's iAudio line. I have an 60GB iAudio X5, and after a year and a half I am still absolutely thrilled with it. It beats the piss out of iPod for functionality (FLAC/OGG/WMA/MP3 compatibility, video, an interface that doesn't suck ass, text file reading, FM radio, audio in/out, recording from radio/audio in/internal mic, and on and on and on), and is substantially cheaper than an iPod of comparable size. I didn't see the X5 on their website, maybe they're phasing it out for the newer models, but check them out. Anecdote: I dropped it in a pile of melting snow one drunk night in my front yard and didn't find it until the next afternoon. Turned right on, no water under the screen or anything, good as new. True story.
the touch round scroller appears to me to be unmatched
I hate them. There is no tactile feedback, so I can't operate it without looking at it, which is a total dealbreaker for me. I bike a lot, I can't be pulling the thing out and trying to look at it in traffic. With my X5 (which has a mini-joystick), I can navigate the whole thing without looking at it.
Re:Horrible fonts ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
I do media production and have always used either Windows or OSX (or both) for my work, in applications such as Logic, Sonar, Premiere, Wavelab, etc. I had tried several times to offload some of this work to a Linux box, but it had never really worked out for me. Either I couldn't get Linux to work with my pro audio hardware, or the applications couldn't do what I needed them to do. I'd always end up back in Windows or OSX.
After an ugly experience with Vista, that came pre-installed on a high-end box that was to become my primary production system (once I upgraded back to XP Pro), I decided it was time for me to make a serious attempt to do my work in Linux again. I'd lost a lot of confidence in the major players (MS and Apple) to serve my needs over the next 10 years. Plus, I had some problems with the way those two companies do business. So, I took the system (the one that the Vista machine was to replace) and installed Ubuntu Studio (Feisty).
The first thing I noticed was that with only a few very easy tweaks (for DVD and codecs), everything was working. My dual-monitor video card and audio hardware worked "out of the box". The audio engine, Jack, was a little bit of a pain to get working, but mostly because of my own inability to read a how-to, but once it was working, the applications that came (for free) such as Ardour were more than just decent.
So finally, I had a secondary system on which I could do a host of pre- and post-production tasks. It gave new life to a system that would otherwise have gathered dust or have been given to a nephew on which to play games. Every day, I find new ways to make use of the Ubuntu Studio box, and I find myself sitting down at that system more and more often. Oh yeah, I didn't have to pay five grand to buy second licenses to the production applications I use because the ones that came with Ubuntu were free.
So, I still use Windows for the bulk of my work, but little by little, the Ubuntu Studio system is making inroads. I'm losing the uncomfortable feeling of being locked in to one of two companies for my operating system, and I'm less afraid that once Microsoft stops supporting XP, I'll be SOL. The impressive improvements that have occurred in the last 4 years and the great new programs that the OSS community has developed will continue, I assume. I keep hoping that one of the major music software developers will put out a native Linux version so I can make the divorce from Microsoft final.
Hell, I've even figured out how to play Eve-Online on the Ubuntu Studio machine.
Re:The summary contradicts itself (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Props to Shuttleworth (Score:5, Interesting)
* plug in a USB memory stick, make some changes, rady to take it out. In Ubuntu, "Safely remove" is one click away in the context menu, and does exactly what you would expect. XP pops up some unintelligble menu of USB root devices and it's 3 clicks until you get to remove it.
* plug in a USB printer. In Ubuntu 7.10, it appears in your printer list automatically. In XP, you have to find the drivers, install the drivers, finish the "new hardware wizard"...
* need more multimedia codecs? In ubuntu, it'll prompt you to install them, then do so. In XP, you have to search the web for them, install some third-party software, repeat until you find some that work.
* want to edit a
* install/update/remove thousands of third party applications. In ubuntu, it's all in the package manager, there's a "new updates notifier", and there's no reboot unless you upgrade to the newest version of the OS. In windows, you only get updates for Microsoft products, and those all require a reboot (and upgrading to the latest OS requires $400 and yet more CDs).
* 3d desktop effects - ubuntu 7.10 has 3d desktop effects enabled by default, where your virtual desktops are on a spinning cube, windows can be consumed by flames when you close them, and there's 3 or 4 alternatives to boring old alt-tab. Windows Vista can give you an orthographic view of your windows when you hit alt-tab and that's about it. XP doesn't have such effects(a small percentage of which improve productivity) and it never will.
* migration - Ubuntu can find and import many settings and files from your windows drive during install. XP just barely acknowledges that other OSes exist, and will blow away other partitions unless you've partitioned in a very particular way.
For all purposes other than games, Ubuntu has long since been surpass XP in usability and user friendliness. "Average users" are not doing those things that require XP; average users surf the net, send email, and write word documents.
Re:The summary contradicts itself (Score:1, Interesting)
The licence of that binary-only component makes it rather difficult to distribute as a core part of he distribution. So Ububtu are already doing everything they possibly can, by having it install itself the first time it's needed.
Something similar happens when you try to play pretty much anything that needs a non-free or patent encumbered codec (anything from the gstreamer-ugly collection, for example).
In Windows, I need to install extra software to play anything but MP3 and WMA. On Mac OS X, I need to install extra software to play anything but MP3 and AAC / M4A. Windows Media Player has a plugin finder service, which is great and all, but only works for Microsoft media formats. iTunes has nothing. How the hell is a Windows user supposed to know what they have to install to play an M4A file? How the hell is a Mac user supposed to know that they have to download Flip4Mac to play WMA or WMV files, and that they still won't work in iTunes?
The point is that media support sucks on all operating systems, unless you happen to be using the formats that are included with the OS.
Comments about the old 7.04 (Score:3, Interesting)
The one I like the best is when I went to the command line and typed 'sux' for the first time.
it told me sux was not installed but that I could install it by installing some package or another.
That was Nirvana for me with 7.04.
Other then that the sound continues to work when I switch users, the WiFi is now 100% instead of 75% and the new intel video drivers mean the OpenGL stuff actually works.
I hope 7.10 has some equally cool things hidden in it.
p.s. anybody know if 'ionice' is installed by default yet?
It would be a good idea cause Beagle indexes on startup and can really slow down DVD performance.