Ubuntu Hardy Heron Announced

Jono Bacon, Community Manager for Ubuntu, has announced development on the next version of the popular Linux distribution name "Hardy Heron". "Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008."

Before the site is slashdotted...

[Nimey]

Introducing the Hardy Heron
August 29th, 2007

I am delighted to have the pleasure of announcing the Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), the next version of Ubuntu that will succeed Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10, due for release in October 2007). Not only will the Ubuntu community continue to do what it does best, produce an easy-to-use, reliable, free software platform, but this release will proudly wear the badge of Long Term Support (LTS) and be supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop. We look forward to releasing the Hardy Heron in April 2008.

With the opening of each new release cycle of Ubuntu, we have more and more opportunity at our fingertips. Not only are our friends in the upstream world constantly innovating and extending their applications and software, but the Ubuntu community continues to see incredible growth in its diverse range of areas such as packaging, development, documentation, quality assurance, translations, LoCo teams and more. Each new release gives us all an opportunity to shine, irrespective of which bricks in the project we are laying, and this is at the heart of our belief - working together to produce an Operating System that will empower its users and shape the IT industry, putting free software at the corner-stone of our direction.

Most people only ever see the end-user view of Ubuntu, running it on their desktops, servers and mobile devices around the world. For these users, Ubuntu provides a simple, convenient means to do what they want to do easily, effectively and without unnecessary complexity. For many of us though, we want to open up the hood and understand how the system works and how to extend and grow it. Thousands of us get out of bed every day, united behind Ubuntu, ready to make a difference, working together to make our vision happen.

Importantly, our ethos of collaboration and freedom extends to the development process as well as the end product. As such, the Ubuntu development process is a very open, transparent one, and anyone is welcome to get involved. It works like this:

        * Everyone is welcome to think of and develop ideas for features that could be present in the Hardy Heron release. These ideas are written as specifications (detailed documents outlining how the idea would work and be implemented). You are welcome to add your specifications to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu [launchpad.net].
        * In October 2007, we will hold the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and generate a schedule of sessions to discuss these specifications. The sessions provide a means for interested parties to help scope out the proposed feature and determine methods and plans to implement it. The Ubuntu Developer Summit is a semi-virtual event in which those who cannot attend can dial in with VoIP and use IRC and collaborative editing with Gobby to take part in the summit.

Everyone is welcome to participate, everyone is welcome to get involved, and everyone is welcome to help shape the form of the Hardy Heron. Let's work together to shake things up, make things happen and make the most compelling Ubuntu release yet. Start your engines...

Re:Silly

[HomerJ]

There's an argument to be made for the goofy "code names". However, they are just that, code names. As far as version numbers, they make about as much sense as any. Higher versions get bigger numbers. 8.04 is a later version than 7.04. 7.10 is going to be a later version than 7.04, but behind 8.04.

What exactly is so confusing about it?

Re:Silly

[hhlost]

Ok, perhaps "non-standard" would have been a better term. And I really should have left the already-confusing part out, because my real concern is that, as someone posted above, convincing someone that the best platform for their needs is "Hardy Heron" in a professional environment is difficult, and embarrassing. Linux has the reputation of being usable only by teenage computer geeks and this does not help. Yes it's a code name, but it's used in public much more than most code names, and regardless, there's no reason for them to be increasingly ridiculous.

Re:Stop with the names already!

[Random832]

This is one thing that drives me crazy about Ubuntu... these names are elitist and completely unintuitive. There is no obvious relationship between the version numbers and the names.

Well, at least recently they collate in the same order

Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake)
Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)
Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)
Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

Re:And hurts Ubuntu

[hhlost]

I develop a medical database that requires a server to be installed locally, for security reasons. I try to convince the hospitals to let me use Ubuntu instead of MS Windows for obvious reasons, but so far have been unsuccessful. My latest attempt was thwarted, at least in part, when the IT staff had a good laugh at the "Feisty Fawn" name.

Re:Hope they get it right this time

[ericrost]

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_i nstall_DVD_playback_capability [ubuntuguide.org]

sudo apt-get install subversion

Re:Hope they get it right this time

[MobyDisk]

Your information is out-of-date. AMD64 has been around since April 2003, and Windows/Linux has been working on since before it left the factory. Actually, all AMD motherboards since that time are 64-bit, even if nobody runs the 64-bit OS's.

what's really in Gibbon and Hippo?

[bcrowell]

It would be interesting to know more about what's planned for Gibbon and Hippo. I'm currently running Feisty on all my home and work machines, and in general it works great. TFA does have a link to a wikified wishlist for Hippo, but that's not the same as knowing what the focus of the release is really going to be: usability, innovation, stability? I'd guess the focus won't be innovation, since they're going to make it a long-term support release.

Here's my person impression of what's already okay in Feisty, and what needs to be improved.

Already okay in Feisty:

1. 64-bit support is perfect, as far as I can tell. I hear a lot of people complaining about it, but all I can say is that I'm running the default packages for firefox, flash, and java, and everything Just Works. The flash and java applet plugins work fine for me. AFAICT, some 64-bit enthusiasts are upset that they can't run these plugins as native 64-bit apps in a 64-bit native browser. What I can't figure out is why that matters...? If it works, it works.
2. Wifi just worked for me, and is now sufficiently integrated with the Gnome gui to make it easy for my 11-year-old daughter to deal with it on her machine.
3. The kernel has built-in support for AMD's Cool'n'Quiet energy-saving technology.

Problems with Feisty:

1. ACPI power management doesn't work. This is a particularly bad problem for laptops. My laptop would shut down as soon as Gnome started, because it believed the battery was dead, when it really wasn't. Hibernation has never worked on any machine I've tried it on. Sleep typically doesn't work. To be fair, this may not be the fault of the linux/ubuntu developers; apparently a lot of hardware manufacturers refuse to supply enough information to allow kernel developers to know what hardware registers need to be restored when waking from sleep or hibernation.
2. Getting a working java runtime is still more work than it needs to be. At the very least, you have to enable a non-free repository, and then add an obscurely named package. I assume this is basically a licensing issue, and will go away as the open-source runtime matures and has the rest of its proprietary components replaced with free ones.
3. CUPS and printing suck to high heaven. This is the single biggest problem I'm facing now. It's not as much of a disaster as it was in earlier versions like Breezy, but it's still a disaster. I have pages and pages of notes on how to get my printer working with Feisty, and it still doesn't work very well -- the printer freezes unpredictably and needs to be power cycled. No, this is not a case where the problem is just that the manufacturer won't release specs; it's a Brother laser printer, and Brother actually hired the CUPS developers to write GPL'd drivers.

Re:And hurts Ubuntu

[Knuckles]

And who prevents him calling in this documents by its official name, Ubuntu 7.04? Or is he selling Windows Longhorn in these docs, too?

Re:And hurts Ubuntu

[nuzak]

Firefox has a component named "libpr0n". It's developed by an organization named Mozilla (which also develops a full suite named Seamonkey), and the fundamental basis of its UI technology uses an XML namespace defined by a uri of, get ready for it, http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there. is.only.xul [mozilla.org]

If you are in the business of reselling a distribution, you may have a point. If you cannot sufficiently hide the development names of pieces of your system from dour humourless micromanagers, then you cannot do your job, full stop. This may or may not be your fault, but it's hardly a reason to keep dragging out the same tired old "the name is too silly" argument. Serious people take Mark Shuttleworth seriously, and it's not just because he has money.

Re:Just use the adjective.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same with Gusty...

A Gusty gibbon would presumably stink the place out; just as well it's Gutsy. :)

Re:And hurts Ubuntu

[smellsofbikes]

Not only that, but also humans are fantastic at post-decision rationalization. We'll tell ourselves we decided something for good, logical reasons, and even make some up and convince ourselves that's why we chose things, but psychologists that spend a lot of time watching people, claim that most of the time even when people give reasons for their choices, it's likely those reasons don't have much to do with their choices.
Another way of putting the Carnegie claim, which I base on having read books like "The Paradox Of Choice" by Barry Schwartz and the research on which Malcolm Gladwell based "Blink" is that we've probably made our decision within a tenth of a second of being offered a choice, and the rest of the time we spend choosing, is spent second-guessing and rationalizing that decision -- we're trying to decide whether an instinctive, pattern-matching, non-rational reaction was correct or not, and generally speaking, we decide it's correct.

Re:And hurts Ubuntu

[Scarblac]

Why should the Ubuntu organization put any effort whatsoever into convincing irrational people to use their operating system? They're not selling anything. Advertising is for a company that wants to convince irrational people to buy their product so that they can make lots of money. Ubuntu doesn't want to make lots of money. Based on Ubuntu's actions, I'm guessing it's enough for them to make a great system and then let the people who are smart enough to appreciate it enjoy it.

From their About us [ubuntu.com]: Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system.

If that's their aim, then convincing irrational people to use it seems a pretty important activity.