New Ubuntu Foundation Announced 315
AccUser writes "Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu
Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The
Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m. From the article: 'The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to ensure that Ubuntu will remain fully supported for an extended period of time, and continue to produce new releases of the distribution. As a first step, the Foundation announces that Ubuntu version 6.04, due for release in April 2006, will be supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.'"
Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's (Score:4, Informative)
I ordered 20 x86 versions and 15 x86_64 versions, and they arrived in a semi-timely manner.
Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's (Score:2, Informative)
Before it is /.ed (Score:1, Informative)
08 July 2005
Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd, founders of the popular Ubuntu
Linux-based operating system, have today announced the creation of The
Ubuntu Foundation with an initial funding commitment of US$10m.
The Ubuntu Foundation will employ core Ubuntu community members to
ensure that Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) will remain fully supported for an
extended period of time, and continue to produce new releases of the
distribution. As a first step, the Foundation announces that Ubuntu
version 6.04, due for release in April 2006, will be supported for
three years on the desktop and five years on the server.
The Foundation was established on July 1st 2005 with an initial
funding commitment of US$10 million, to ensure the continuity of the
Ubuntu project and create a legal vehicle that represents the
community structures of the project.
"It's important for us to distinguish the philanthropic and
non-commercial work that is at the heart of the Ubuntu project, from
the commercial support and certification programs that are the focus
of Canonical Ltd." said Mark Shuttleworth, who is founder of the
project and is making the initial $10m commitment to the
Foundation. "The core team members employed by the Ubuntu Foundation
will ensure that we can meet public commitments to keep Ubuntu
entirely free of charge, as well as meeting commitments of support for
extended periods. I'm very excited at the progress that has been made
in bringing free software to the global marketplace, and pleased to
continue my support for the project in this way."
Ubuntu has quickly become a leading distribution in the free software
world, taking the #1 place in DistroWatch popularity rankings over all
timescales which are published. The distribution focuses on usability,
security and stability on desktops and servers, and on making free
software widely available for individuals and organisations who are
ready to switch from proprietary platforms, such as Microsoft Windows.
Ubuntu has also become the basis of many other derivative
distributions, particularly those backed by govenments for widespread
deployment. The government of Andalucia, Spain recently announced that
its own version of Linux would be based on Ubuntu, and deployed in all
educational operations.
LONGER SERVER SUPPORT CYCLE
One driving factor behind the creation of the Foundation was the need
to ensure that an Ubuntu release can be deployed on servers, which
demand much slower release and upgrade cycles. "In order to support
the use of free software on database and other servers, we will be
offering security support for the Ubuntu base and major server
components for a full five years", said Matt Zimmerman, CTO of the
Ubuntu project.
As Ubuntu and free software in general become more mainstream, it has
become costly for companies and large organisations to keep track of
the rapid pace of development. In the desktop environment the problem
is more manageable, and steady improvements in the usability of
desktop office and productivity applications have been welcomed. In
the datacenter, however, where Linux and free software are considered
mature, deployments have a preference for fewer releases with long
lifecycles. Ubuntu version 6.04, to be released in April 2006, will be
aimed at meeting those requirements with a full five year commitment
to provide security and other critical updates for servers. This also
meets the needs of OEM distribution providers and ISVs, who have
expressed strong interest in supporting free software environments but
who prefer to be able to plan for releases and support them for longer
periods of time.
The extended service support for Ubuntu version 6.04 will remain free
of charge, under the same terms as the support currently provided to
every release of Ubuntu. The extended service support prog
Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's (Score:3, Informative)
Really impressed with Ubuntu (Score:5, Informative)
I've used Ubuntu as a rescue cd at work very reliably.
Can't wait until October for the next release.
Re:Oh crikey, not another one! (Score:5, Informative)
Mandriva was doing pretty good about your request, merging Mandrake, Connectiva, and Lycoris... It seems to be more aimed at the desktop than the server, although Mandrake has good server products too.
However, after being a Mandrake user for 3 years, I switched to Ubuntu for its easy install and upgrade path, in addition to maintaining more recent software. I hope that Ubuntu abosorbs some Debian distrobutions (Knoppix, knoppmyth, etc.), while maintaining their simplicity.
Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ubuntu review (Score:1, Informative)
As for folder navigation, you must have spatial browsing enabled, you need to turn this off to get all the buttons and much more sane navigation.
Look round the Ubuntu forums and the starter guide.
Re:I see a problem (Score:4, Informative)
Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, but they are not mooching off of Debian. Ubuntu is providing value to its users and Debian. If you look at the Debian Gnome 2.10 packages, you see Ubuntu finger prints all over it.
Also Debian is not worsening. Its changing. THe project has become too large for the old, informal ways to work. Debian is evolving and though there are growing pains, its getting better. With the rise of teams and more formalization, Debian is looking healthier and healthier every day. They finally released Sarge, and now it looks as though Etch will be out in a timely manner.
Seriously, Debian isn't sick, its just changing. Ubuntu and Debian also already work very well together. Reference the Gnome 2.10 packages and the upcoming switch of debian to xorg. Both have Ubuntu Developers deeply involved because they are also Debian Developers and as Ubuntu Developers have already gone through it.
Re:Ubuntu review (Score:3, Informative)
Sound: That's a really crappy bug. I've not experienced it myself, but I can quite believe it. I believe that Desktop Linux is gradually converging on ALSA (I know at least that ARTS is dying off) as the "one true sound system", so hopefully this will be less of an issue as time goes by.
Synaptic: Agreed, that's pretty lame. The unfortunate thing is that it would probably be just an evenings work to add a GUI for selecting repostories.
Applications: I use Kubuntu (which uses KDE instead of GNOME), and I've not seen this happen so far - I can think of no packages I've installed that have not shown up on the menus. However, finding the sodding thing is not always so easy - it would be nice to add a special "Recently Installed Apps" sub-menu that contains a temporary list of apps that have recently been installed, or at least some way of indicating where in the menus your most recently installed apps have been placed. Even better would be a text-box in the menu itself that has "find-as-you-type"-style searching that searches for both app names and descriptions.
Actually, I might just go and file a bug report about that right now
Firefox: I've not noticed actual "unresponsiveness", but the Linux version of Firefox has always seemed far more sluggish than the Windows, alas.
Menus: Glad to hear it!
Folder Navigation: I'm guessing this is the much-maligned "spatial navigation" that caused a kerfuffle a while back. Thankfully, KDE uses the Konqueror file manager which I find to be very capable indeed. I actually miss some of its features while I'm at my Windows machine at work.
A Rose By Any Other Name (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How Did These Guys Get $10M? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It would be nice if they actually sent out CD's (Score:2, Informative)
It's a great help for getting installation CDs since few people there have high-speed internet yet.
Re:I see a problem (Score:1, Informative)
Taking snapshots from sid and stabilizing them is exactly what Ubuntu is doing. And they are also doing it for main.
As you rightly point out, they also do provide things that aren't in sid. Xorg, or the newest Gnome release are examples, but that doesn't change the fact that they do take most of their software from sid initially.
Finally, taking a snapshot form sid is neither illegal, nor is it morally wrong, so let's just cut the moral crap.
Re:Developers, What?? (Score:3, Informative)
'informational list of build-essential packages
If you do not plan to build Debian packages, you don't need this package. Moreover this package is not required for building Debian packages.
This package contains an informational list of packages which are considered essential for building Debian packages. This package also depends on the packages on that list, to make it easy to have the build-essential packages installed.
If you have this package installed, you only need to install whatever a package specifies as its build-time dependencies to build the package. Conversely, if you are determining what your package needs to build-depend on, you can always leave out the packages this package depends on.
This package is NOT the definition of what packages are build-essential; the real definition is in the Debian Policy Manual. This package contains merely an informational list, which is all most people need. However, if this package and the manual disagree, the manual is correct.'
Re:Huh? Terminology please (Score:3, Informative)
The apt suite is Debian's package management system. Actually, I'm not sure if Red Hat came up with RPM or not. RPM.org isn't immediately clear on that point. But Red Hat is the distribution most strongly associated with RPM. I wish I could offer a comparison, but I couldn't offer a fair one. I tried Red Hat a few years ago and fell into "dependency hell," which is when a package manager can't figure out what needs to be installed. But this was several years ago. From what I gather, RPM is much better now. I've had no reason to switch from Debian though, so I haven't tried it since. Still, apt is nice. :-)
Strictly speaking, "ricer" is a racist term for asian youths who extensively modify their cars. The term has been picked up other uses to mean people who obsessively customize to gain minimal performance benefits. Gentoo is a source based distribution (for the most part) -- as such, the user must compile the software he plans on using. Gentoo was designed to facilitate easy optimization for your hardware/needs during the compile phase. This tends to cause much obsessiveness among its users.
I don't know what your goals are for Linux, but for desktop use, it would be hard to go wrong with Ubuntu. Debian is great for just about everything, but ideally you'd have some more experience (or enough patience to RTFM enough to ask smart questions). There are obviously other great distributions. Once you figure out what your needs are, check out http://www.distrowatch.com/ [distrowatch.com] to help you pick a distribution.
Re:Ubuntu review (Score:3, Informative)
Sound - fixed in FC4. ALSA dmix takes care of this for sound cards that can't do hardware mixing. It works for every ALSA app, which most programs now support. The "aoss" program can be used for apps which still use OSS (though it should be applied automatically ... expecting users to know this is silly)
Synaptic was never designed to have a good UI, it was designed as a frontend to apt-get. Try autopackage [autopackage.org] if you want software installs with a simple and straightforward user interface. Yes, not many packages yet. That is teh suck. Ask your favourite projects maintainers to build them!
Applications - you should never have to add items to the menus manually. If you need to do that, it's a bug in the application itself (some apps just don't register menu entries). Why not send a polite email to the maintainer asking them to add a menu entry and icon for their program?
One other person said they had to wait several hours for it to show up, or that they had to restart gnome-panel to make them appear. This is always a bug; the items should appear instantly. Unfortunately the "gamin" server which is replacing FAM has had a lot of teething problems, in my experience. Make sure your system is fully up to date. It's a pretty good demonstration of Spolskis "don't rewrite software" maxim.
Firefox - not much to say here. Yes, it can be slow with lots of tabs. There are a bunch of nasty memory leaks fixed in the "Deerpark" release that should be going stable soon.
Folder Navigation - this is only a problem in Ubuntu, which unilaterally decided to change the file manager so the old window closed itself when a new window was opened. In the "real" version which Fedora uses, they stay open. The downside? If you have deeply nested folders, you get lots of windows. The upside? Easy to have multiple folders open at once. For the next GNOME version the Nautilus browser view is getting much improved: it's likely that Ubuntu will switch to browser mode by default at that time rather than continue to hack spatial mode.
Re:Ubuntu review (Score:2, Informative)
I'll tell you what is the big deal about Ubuntu. (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: I know a pretty good bit about the project seeing as how I'm a moderator (and one of the largest posters) on the forum.
For me personally Ubuntu just does a lot of the little things correctly. Its based off of Debian, so it has access to the what might be the biggest package repo in the land (I don't know about Gentoo , but Ubuntu has 15000+ packages in all of its repos together), but the developers only support a small part of that so unlike Debian there are timely releases. Like Fedora and Dropline, Ubuntu has a great Gnome desktop (I'll admit that Kubuntu isn't as polished) that is very useful from the start.
It has a great community (can't compare it with Gentoo, its a different crowd) that is more than willing to help. Our how to section is excellent. [ubuntuforums.org]
It supports important things like Mono and Python, and helps Debian catch up to the modern era (by adding things like Xorg).
Finally, Ubuntu is easy to use out of the box (for most nerds) but can be VERY configurable (though probably not as much as Gentoo) and is a happy medium between a Xandros and a Slackware.
Thanks for you time.