Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 2 Now Available (betanews.com) 97
An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu Linux 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" is almost here -- it is due on April 26. In the interim, today, the second -- and final -- beta becomes available. Bionic Beaver is very significant, as it is an LTS version, meaning "Long Term Support." This is important to those that prefer stability to bleeding edge and don't want to deal with the hassle of upgrades. In other words, you can install 18.04 and be confident that it will be supported for 5 years. In comparison, non-LTS Ubuntu versions get a mere 9 months.
There is plenty to be excited about with Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 2, including the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment -- Beta 1 did not include GNOME at all. Of course, all the other DE flavors are available too, such as KDE and Xfce. The kernel is at 4.15, which while not the most current version, is still quite modern. Also included is LibreOffice 6.0 -- an essential tool that rivals Microsoft Office. Wayland is available as a technical preview, although X remains the default display server -- for now.
There is plenty to be excited about with Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 2, including the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment -- Beta 1 did not include GNOME at all. Of course, all the other DE flavors are available too, such as KDE and Xfce. The kernel is at 4.15, which while not the most current version, is still quite modern. Also included is LibreOffice 6.0 -- an essential tool that rivals Microsoft Office. Wayland is available as a technical preview, although X remains the default display server -- for now.
"Bionic Beaver" (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Could have been worse -- Canadian Beaver
Re: (Score:2)
Dunno, 'Canadian Beaver' isn't very, well, topical.
"Bionic" has a much bigger potential audience - very cyber and all that - and just really sucks as a commercial product name.
They must have picked up some old, ex Microsoft marketing execs ....
"You'd make a grown man cry."
Re: "Bionic Beaver" (Score:1)
In sticking with Ubuntu naming convention, I think the proper name would be either Cybernetic Cunt, or if truly sticking to the convention by using an animal, Cybernetic Castor.
Re: "Bionic Beaver" (Score:2)
It's supposed to be an animal, so obviously the next version will be cybernetic cock.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:"Bionic Beaver" (Score:5, Funny)
Is it just me or does "Bionic Beaver" sound awfully similar to "Cybernetic Vagina?"
and you couldn't come up with a synonym which starts with a C, now could you?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Is it just me or does "Bionic Beaver" sound awfully similar to "Cybernetic Vagina?"
To keep with the theme I'm sure Ubuntu 22.10 will be called Katya Kazanova.
Re: (Score:3)
Is it just me or does "Bionic Beaver" sound awfully similar to "Cybernetic Vagina?"
The in-house / development version name is "Jaime Sommers" [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Ubuntu has hit industry and pretty much the only option from most companies for those that prefer .deb over .rpm.
Companies usually target LTS and LTS-1 for this reason. Most of my tools are on 14.04 and 16.04. Knowing that 18.04 is coming and in beta means that I can get out ahead of the curve and figure out what's broken and what scripts I need to write to prepare for our migration.
Knowing how we roll things out that may come 2019, but I can at least start preparing now in my 'down time'. Or I can sit on
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Jesus, are you a fucking idiot or something???
Re: (Score:3)
18.04 LTS is undergoing beta testing - in case anything is seriously bad before it's finally released. It's not the beta itself that is LTS, it's the final product. You're beta testing what will be 18.04 LTS.
Though, it seems kind of late, I mean, it's April already a
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Apart from Gnome 3 and systemd, you mean?
Re: (Score:2)
Your post is marked flamebait and I personally hate all the nastiness against Ubuntu or, really, anything that moves or doesn't move on Slashdot.
But YEAH. At least on the systemd, I agree with your sentiment. Ubuntu would be a much better distribution without it.
I don't want to use gnome 3. Or really gnome anything. I like my systems simpler than that. But I can use KDE or even TWM if I want to. I'm not forced to use another distro because Ubuntu has gnome 3. Me running some other window manager does
Re: More like Bionic Bastards (Score:2)
If you're in an enterprise environment with a policy that you must have paid support available for everything, then your only option is systemd.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. And Charles Lindbergh was pro-Germany at the start of WWII. Give Ubuntu it's due for its great work, then hold Ubuntu to the fire on systemd. It's crap. They should remove it, so we can go back to focusing on their heroism.
Nostalgia (Score:2)
I miss the days of Ubuntu Linux 18.02.
Re: (Score:1)
7.04 was peak Ubuntu.
Re:Nostalgia (Score:4, Insightful)
7.04 was peak Ubuntu.
I'll have to disagree with you there. I started with Ubuntu version 7.04. There were a lot of bugs. Flash was a pain to get working, display drivers were a mess. I must have run the command "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" a dozen times to get it to work.
10.04 was the best. Everything worked. Everything was in a logical place, with exception of the window controls, which you get used to. If you couldn't deal with the window controls, 8.04 wasn't bad either.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe.
I started Ubuntu with 7.04 (maybe that was the one I liked most even, I forget). I loved the 2 panel gnome 2, and it seemed to work great. Compiz worked well, and everything seemed good for me (flash and nvidia drivers).
With 8.04 a hard-drive scheduling issue made it unusable, and I pretty much stopped using Linux as a desktop. I can fully imagine it got better, but I don't think I'll find a desktop I like more than gnome 2 of that era with compiz as a window manager. Also, it was a pretty exciting ti
Re: (Score:2)
Hehe, I started using Linux back when you had to download floppy images. My first commercial distro was Redhat 3.9. I recently installed Ubuntu 17.4 and was warped back to that Redhat install, the text based installer was almost unchanged from that 1996 experience. I also had another retro experience, the laptop I had bought for the project used a Realtek wireless card and apparently despite developing the chip in 2016 and shipping it to HP to include in 2017 model laptops they didn't give drivers to the up
Re: (Score:2)
I've never understood the need for anything other than a text based installer for an OS. How often are you supposed to use it, after all?
Re: (Score:1)
Text based installers are excellent.
I was particularly fond of yast. Being able to configure just like my install was so amazing to me.
Before that, I used to reinstall redhat whenever I got new hardware...
The Debian text installer was pretty excellent back then too.
Re: (Score:2)
ow I didn't know about dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, but in 7.04 the xorg.conf file was still static and I edited it all the time.
Yes, reconfigure xserver-xorg was a wizard program that would edit xorg.conf for you. I edited xorg.conf a few times, but I only made things worse. I'd end up stuck with a black screen and cursor, and reconfigure xserver-xorg would bail me out.
Re: Nostalgia (Score:2)
Funny, I just upgraded to the beta from a functional install, and then had to manually edit xorg.conf because the automated tools thought everything was fine even though I was stuck with a text console.
Changed one line for the nvidia driver and it started right up.
Re: (Score:2)
For desktop or server? When did they break those apart?
Re: (Score:1)
Desktop.
They were split (wrt to install media) from the start, but server was basically just a minimal text based install (maybe it still is?).
Eucalyptus is when I feel they started pushing server features as first class.
But this is from memory, so salt grains and all.
I still use the server, but the next one I do will likely be SUSE Leap, since it comes with netatalk 3.x, and will save me some compiling.
Re: (Score:2)
I know! It was the single best version of Ubuntu released in the first half of 2007.
Sean Connery (Score:2)
You're sitting on a goldmine Shuttleworth!
Bionic Beaver (Score:1)
My first though was some mid/late 1970's naughty fan fiction between Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers.
Re: (Score:2)
Ubuntu Mate ?!? (Score:2)
Ubuntu is going after Mint.
It's a way to proof your bad idea with Unity!
The funny part of the show, is that Mint is a lot more stable and have better hardware discovery than Ubuntu. They lost their leading in usuability, and not only because the strange UI !
Re:Ubuntu Mate ?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a way to proof your bad idea with Unity!
I'm not sure if that was a typo or really clever. But "proof" noun: a test or trial of something.
Which is exactly what it was. It was a test to eliminate what was at the time an incredibly fucked up Gnome interface. Providing an alternative to that abortion was exactly the opposite of a bad idea. The fact that the Gnome guys came to their senses, and that upstream at that point has something that works makes dropping the project quite the humble move.
Canonical have done this a few times already: e.g. upstart, and mir (although while dropping mir work in the face of Wayland I think this one was resource constricted given that Wayland is not prime time ready and the result was to drop back to X11).
They lost their leading in usuability
Debatable. Typically when I see someone on Slashdot complain that something is unusable it typically means: someone moved my cheese and therefor it must be worse. Usable is in the eye of the beholder, and if the beholder is beholding an OS running on a tablet than Unity was pretty much the *only* usable interface.
Re: (Score:2)
Typically when I see someone on Slashdot complain that something is unusable it typically means: someone moved my cheese and therefor it must be worse.
There's some justification in this. Though sometimes, it seems like they're doing a Penn and Teller act, where the cheese is under one of the cups. Maybe. And not the clear plastic ones.
Then, you find out the cheese (set tab titles in Terminal) isn't under any of the cups at all; Teller has eaten it while you were distracted by all the legerdemain. (Though, actually, that particular brain fart was Gnome's fault, which is why I switched to the Mate terminal.)
Re: (Score:2)
I wasn't looking for a tablet running an ubuntu os, because these kind of thing even, if it was a expected product wasn't never a reality. but my touch tablet run Mint mint !
Re: (Score:2)
i LIKE Unity. But nothing about Ubuntu compels you to use it. Run Gnome or KDE, or whatever.
Re: (Score:1)
Don't look at me... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
They're only on "B" right now. If you'd suggested "Buggering Baboon" you might have had a shot. Be patient - M will come around again.
So excited (Score:3)
There is plenty to be excited about ... including the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment.
'Cause I use Mate, not that GNOME 3 <expletive deleted />
Re: (Score:3)
Better for hardware (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks Ubuntu! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've said before in previous posts that I personally use Fedora, since my day job revolves around Red Hat based systems. But I LOVE Ubuntu. When I starting using Linux back in 1997 (I was late to the game), the community was toxic.
The choices were basically Slackware, which, while a good distro the SW community really expected you to be a Unix god and was unwilling to provides helpful answers other than "gtfo n00b" and "go use windows".
The other choice was Mandriva which had a better community but just the worst documentation. Which meant, you'd go to the community to ask for help, you'd get a response of "RTFM", which would have been fine, had there been a manual and/or if it had had correct information in it. (Yes, I know there were other distros at the time but those were the two big communities)
So a lot of my time was spent reading/editing source code to learn how to use application which should have "just worked" in the first damn place. Now to be fair, I learned a ton because of that.
Then came Ubuntu, along with its rich sugar-daddy. In came professional tech-writers documenting the system, documenting the applications, writing correct and updated how-to guides. In came professional coders fixing long standing bugs. And I watched many other distros die as they bled users to Ubuntu. Even if you dislike some of the design decisions Ubuntu has made over the years, they greatly increased the quality of the entire Linux ecosystem.
Thank you Ubuntu devs for raising the bar!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
While the doc team may have been lead by professional tech-writers when Ubuntu started, it wasn't professionals that wrote the documentation. It was normal Joe's like myself that wrote a lot of the documentation. There was a well documented process and a structure we had to follow.
Mostly we followed the kde-docs format of leveraging docbook and then kicking it out to HTML. There were two of us that wrote the docs for Kubuntu and we spent a lot of time rushing after feature freeze to make sure everything
Re: (Score:2)
what are you talking about? In 1997 you already has most of the distro's that are still around today; redhat (not RHEL), suse, debian, slack, etc. plenty choice!
and let's not talk about the more obscure, now long forgotten distro's, like the first I tried - Ygdrassil.
And it also comes with X2Go in the standard Repo! (Score:1)
Zippy, fast, responsive remote Desktops and Citrix-like Published Applications, all useable from the standard Ubuntu 18.04 repository, no more need to manually add a PPA.
TL;DR: https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:newtox2go [x2go.org]
In theory but not in practice (Score:2)
In other words, you can install 18.04 and be confident that it will be supported for 5 years
But if you install any third-party apps, there is little prospect that they will install on a 5 year-old system, if you feel the need to upgrade them during the LTS period. Even if you install all the fixes, patches and other stuff provided by the LTS supplier.
And it is practically certain that some of your apps will require bug fix upgrades or security upgrades during that time. And once those (non LTS) apps start to require libraries or other dependencies that fall outside what the LTS system has chosen
Re: (Score:2)
LTS beta (Score:2)