Submitted by “I’m writing to propose a six week delay in the release date of Dapper, in order to do additional validation, certification, localisation, and polish. Work towards our feature goals for Dapper is very much on target. However, in some senses Dapper is a ‘first’ for us, in that it is the first ‘enterprise quality’ release of Ubuntu, for which we plan to offer support for a very long time. I, and others, would very much like Dapper to stand proud amongst the traditional enterprise linux releases from Red Hat, Debian and SUSE as an equal match on quality, support and presentation.” And on a related note, Ubuntu now runs on Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) processor too.
The work put into Ubuntu Dapper is paying off. Right now, my parents are using a Linux Desktop in their home and actually enjoying it. I kept update-notifier from running and manually go over to their house and update it once every few weeks or so with no major problems thus far. My mother is in awe of the whole compiz/Xgl shebang and how “pretty” it is (as she put it).
The polish that is already in Dapper is quite a showcase of the developers fanatical attention to detail and great work from Canonical. From the 10,000ft view, many of the Ubuntu developers are also Debian developers and so some of these changes go back into Debian proper.
The only thing Ubuntu is really lacking is more ISV support. I know that they have IBM’s DB2 certified for Breezy, but thats not very much as far as “enterprise software” goes. IBM said good things in a recent article about desktop linux and that goes to show Ubuntu isn’t “just a fad”.
Do you know debian package management? Help the community out and become a Master of the Universe (MOTU):
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU
I imagine most people understand that this delay, if enacted, would only improve the distro and is not necessarily indicative of any sort of failure, but I foresee shifty glances. When Ubuntu publicized its six-month release schedule back during the Debian Sarge epoch, people seemed to herald the faster release schedule as deliverance from the stagnation of the Debian project. Whether it’s necessary or not, people seem to prefer frequent released to incremental updates, and this delay may be taken as a backslide on their promises. I’m not close enough to Ubuntu to know whether or not a delay will substantially benefit Dapper or is unnecessary, but I can’t imagine it will be well received by the community. Perhaps for that reason alone they should strive to release it on time and save some of the improvements for the 2006.10 release.
i actually think that maybe 6 is too little, and 12 is a little too much, so, maybe 9 months is a good idea …
From the article:
The Dapper user will likely be new to Linux, and working in a more
corporate environment than previous Ubuntu release adopters. They will
likely also be given Dapper to use, rather than choosing it for
themselves, as Dapper is deployed in larger-scale environments.
Additional testing time will shake out more bugs and give us a more
robust codebase to support.
This statement is intersting to me in itself because I still thought of Ubuntu as being used by people who just happen to like Linux and use it at home for their personal business. I knew that Shuttleworth was going around the world trying to get large contracts, but this is the first that I’ve heard about it paying off. Cool. Though, it seems a little weird to think of a distro that is both a free, community driven distro and also has many corporate users.
By delaying the release of Dapper Drake it will become out of sync with the 6 month release cycle of Gnome. The bleeding edge nature of Ubuntu is the main reason a lot of people (including me) are using it. So I wonder what kind of effect a 6 week delay will have to the installed base. Ubuntu wouldn’t be the one of the first distro’s to ship with a new Gnome release anymore. Linux users usually aren’t very committed to a distro. If another distro steps up and releases first with Gnome 2.14 it could cost Ubuntu a lot of users.
Ofcourse more experienced users know how to edit their /etc/apt/sources.list and install Dapper anyway, but most Ubuntu users aren’t that tech savvy and will just download another distro that ships with 2.14 by default.
I understand Mark’s ambition to become big on enterprise desktops and servers, but maybe he should consider a seperate release cycle for enterprise products, kind of like how Redhat and SuSE are currently developed. Get the release out so it can be tested by the big worldwide community. Squash the bugs, get it certified by ISV’s, polish it up and package it into an Enterprise version a couple of months after the community release.
huh?
explain to me why they could not just put out an update when teh new Gnome 3 comes out?
Or why someone who can’t figure how to install the newest Gnome without reinstalling his operating system would want the newest Gnome.
uhhh…. Ubuntu does not work like that, you just need to change your sources.list to the newest release and issue two commands:
#sudo apt-get update
#sudo apt0get dist-upgrade
then sit back and reboot the system in 30 minutes to the latest release.
doh…. NM, I just reread what he said and saw what you were talking about.
Good point. But, if the choice is between a distro that has a release marked stable with the new GNOME, and something the Ubuntu devs call an alpha release, some people (even long-time users) may opt for the stable distro.
You or I may know that Dapper has been quite stable for a while now, but not all Linux users know that. So a person may be aware that they can easily upgrade to Dapper to get the latest GNOME, but since Dapper is still officially alpha quality, they may go to something else. I believe Fedora will now technically have GNOME 2.14 before Ubuntu.
Anyway, I’m just playing devil’s advocate. I’m an Ubuntu user who doesn’t mind this delay. As long as it doesn’t set back the next release.
“You or I may know that Dapper has been quite stable for a while now, but not all Linux users know that.”
I like (U,K,X)buntu , but to say Dapper is stable is a bit off base. Dapper can and does break , then gets fixed, regularly. In fact ?buntu, when released is barley stable enough for my tastes. Six months is not enough time to put together a quality distro, Debian has it right, if it takes, and it does, 1-2 years so be it. Being overly enthusiastic about ?buntu doesn’t change the fact you can’t put out new releases every 6 mounts, just because Mark Shuttleworth says you can doesn’t make it so.
I am not try to flame ?buntu, I like it, but there is a bit to much smoke & mirrors from its ardent supporters.
greg
Well… Debian is a little overly cautious. 2 years is a bit long.
Debian is focused to a different audience. Think of it this way. You have a 1000 desktops to maintain and there’s a 2 to 4 month burn in period within your company to make sure all your company standard tools and apps work consistently betweem different environments. Several of your computers have custom settings and upgrading (even through apt-get) is a major effort that requires scheduled downtimes that are agreeable to various groups. If your upgrades aren’t 99% flawless or you stop people from doing work too long, your head is on the line.
Given all this, which distro would you prefer? One that upgrades every 6 months or one that upgrades every 2 to 5 years?
I’d pick the second one every time. Back when Linux was in it’s adolescence, you absolutely had to upgrade every 6 months because if you didn’t, essential new stuff just like HAL was missing and things just wouldn’t run. The foundations were changing every few months. These days, the foundations are mostly all in place and the bulk of the innovation is polish and glitz. The few advanced fundamental innovations like Xen can easily be backported so you can get the best of both worlds (less upgrade work/risk without sacrificing too many features).
it is not as stable as you make it seem.
I do not like it when programs I use crash.
I’m worried about this too, actually it was the first thing that came into my mind after reading the title. I hope they will sort this problem out. Maybe they could rush 6.1x and try to sync to Gnome again, I don’t mind one month of delay but if they skipped Gnome 2.16 that would be a very serious issue for me.
Did all the work?:
David S. Miller for all the coding and debugging.
Matthias Klose likewise for gcc and gcj.
Jeff Bailey likewise for glibc.
Sorry but this is all the heavy lifting to get Linux running on a new chip.
Matthias Klose likewise for gcc and gcj
Matthias is an employee of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company.
Jeff Bailey likewise for glibc
As is Jeff Bailey. So, uhm. What was your point?
Dave Miller didn’t do the work on Red Hat time, while Matthias and Jeff are both Canonical employees. Credit where credit is due and all – we’re good at that. 🙂
i love the fact that they are focusing in a very high quality release and long term support. take your six weeks.
I’m already using Dapper Flight CD4. If this delay really upsets anyone, just download the latest Flight CD, and you’ll be reminded why Ubuntu is the last word in Desktop Linux … (until Novell’s Much-hyped release)
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight4
Edited 2006-03-10 23:58
Sun getting Linux supported and running well on the T1 should perk up the analysts out there. With the specifications of the T1 now open and public, I wouldn’t be suprised to see the *BSD crowd be pretty quick with thier support, too.
Sun should send one T1 server to each BSD team. The PR alone would be worth 100 times the cost of a handful of servers.
As impressive as Ubuntu has ever been since the start, the first two releases had issues. 5.04 came out as the menu were not even fully populated with working features, and several people (including me) had serious sound problems. In 5.10 the kernel was compiled with a different gcc version (not included in the install cd) than the rest of the operating system, causing frustration to people trying to compile their dial-up or wireless drivers. (check the community forum).
Two months spent polishing, debugging and making sure the added features are integrated seamlessly might be well spent.
As for the price to pay, it might not be so large. With Kubuntu and Xubuntu rising to the same status as Ubuntu, the marketing point of being the absolute first to release with the new Gnome is no longer that critical.
Achieving “enterprise quality” would be very nice, and perhaps worth the wait. The bleeding edge crowd will always be able to use the version under development (which currently is amazingly stable – apart from the odd Konqueror crash in Kubuntu).
Steff
Has anyone actually booted Ubuntu on Niagara, or did they just build an install image and assume that it works?
Yes, it’s been tested.
I think that too often, the desire to have the “latest and greatest” has resulted in distros that are not all they could be. The concern about new users is valid. Using more quality control will only improve the adoption of linux, and cause hardware vendors to be more willing to cooperate with the open source community. When “average users” (such as myself) learn how well free software serves their needs, and lets them actually “enjoy computing”(former XP users know what I mean), it can only mean greater adoption of free software. I think delaying a release “until it is ready” is a great idea. There will always be “bleeding edge distros” for those that enjoying working with them.
Paul Sams
In my opinion, Dapper is already ahead in regards to stability than Breezy was at this point in the cycle.
Why not do a release on the scheduled date and then keep on polishing for 6 weeks after the fact? You could still deliver on the Ubuntu 6 month promise and get the stability that enterprise customers need for Dapper. After 6 weeks you could just re-issue ISOs and anyone who had downloaded before that could get their updates via the nifty update manager, and wait until after those 6 weeks to publish the CDs via shipit.
It would almost be like a Service Pack, except more subtle because the underlying API/ABI would be completely unchanged, it would just be more polish and care and bugfixes — exactly what the goal is.
Not a flame at all. I have just started using Breezy on one of my units, as it now seems stable. I use the KDE desktop. When Breezy first arrived, it worked well on my laptop, but was problematic on my desktop, whether using Gnome, or KDE. While I realize that the problem may have been with my paticular desktop, Linux has to be “twice as good” as MS to get any respect. Glitches are tolerated in windows, but let a Linux Desktop have any glitch, and the naysayers go wild. That GNU/Linux is as advanced as it already is now, is a testament to the community that has put together the software, most often, a thankless job.
Paul Sams
Sounds like Shuttleworth has some good reasons to want to push this release back a bit, I think that any problems caused by such a delay would be small in comparison to the opportunities that would open up if they reach all of the goals that they have set
Dapper NEEDS the time to be bug-fixed. It has been, by far, the most difficult upgrade of all their previous releases. Stuff is constantly broken, whether its ALSA, the kernel, KDE, Gnome, it runs the gaumet. Their forum is also filled with issues that have yet to be resolved.
It’s not just newbes who are running into these problems, its intermediate or better users of the distro, the ones who actually can make bug reports and even fixes. I love my Ubuntu, but Dapper forced me to go back to my iBook for daily work.
I hope they will be able to release Dapper with good support for Multi Head, but the Xorg developers need to help with that. Xorg 6.8.x was pretty good for me in Multi Head with ATI Radeon. I will keep using Breezy in my main development machine until they Xorg 7 works fine again for me. In my little research a while back, I found many people with similar problems in a Debian mailing list.
Linux is like that! Constant development, with new features and new problems all the time. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.
Here is hoping for people to join the Ubuntu umbrella in producing an unified distro for everybody. Please, it’s about time to create LiveCDs based on Ubuntu. I don’t mean “official Ubuntu LiveCDs”, I mean distro creators who could create unique distros based on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a good base, with great support from a big community. Stop trying to create distros based on Slack or other less used distros, because we need support for hardware, we need support for software, etc, and by targeting a main distro it’s much easier to provide good support.
Here is an idea: create a LiveCD based on Dapper Drake, but use Xorg 6.8.x instead of the latest versions. 🙂 Dapper Drake has an installer from LiveCD now. It just needs some polishing.
This delay would be a great thing considering how buggy previous releases have been. Sadly, few OSS projects have time to spend on testing and polish alone and ubuntu could certainly use some.
Should take some of this extra time to include Intel Mac support (iMac, MacBook Pro) thru EFI support.
Look at http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page
There is already some work done (LiveCD for booting linux on Intel Macs) around Ubuntu.
Ubuntu rocks! Ubuntu on MacBook Pro would be phenomenal 😉
My 2 cts
It feels a bit like politics – you need to listen to the words that are not said, or told with a charming chime. From there one can only guess and previous posters have done some. Just one last word – Marc Shuttleworth knows business. We know he knows. Assume he has pondered seriously about this move to be worthwhile.
No I don’t have ubuntu. Not yet. I am looking at it sharply for the years of discussions with the debian fans. Debian itself had spurred more special purpose offsprings than the rest overall. But it was too slow for the software junkies who want to run the latest stuff always. And ubuntu was going to fill the need.
So personally, I would not rate any noted stability problems too high. The side remarks on a flourishing ecosystem seem interesting. Including ecosystems not noted as headlines .. with ISPs drafting their own offspring based on ubuntu material. Perhaps they have asked for slight delay? For some extra feature? Then, oh well then, it would be a serious business move.
Just as Mr. Shuttleworth wrote; this is about polish. This is not, as anduril writes, about Bugfixes. It’s not about KDE (Ubuntu doesn’t shipt KDE), it’s not about the Kernel and it’s just a little bit about GNOME.
Mr. Shuttleworth and (for what I know) Jeff Waught want this release of Ubuntu to be absolutly stonishing. They want it shining, they want it working. They want everything as smooth and slick as possible. It’s not about big things, this (proposed) delay, it’s about the little things. Things that make out of a jagged jig-saw collections of software a true distribution.
Dapper is going to be the first release with support over several years. Dapper is also the base of Canonical’s business plan: Linux support for big companies and gouvernments. And because of this, they want Dapper to be as good as it can possibly be.
I don’t think that this will cost users. I already have a pre-release version of Dapper installed. I am already bleeding edge. For the enthusiasts, this won’t matter at all; they had their release, they have it every day through apt-get.
I always thought that Dapper would be a very good release. With this extra month of polishing it’s going to be amazing.
This is suppose to be the enterprise release but doesn’t include out of the box integration with enterprise authentication systems such as AD, LDAP, or even NIS. Nor will it support out of the box the enterprise standard for wireless authentication, WPA.
If the delay is really to ensure that this release meets enterprise quality and needs than these issues should be addressed during any delay. If not, than according to Shuttleworth, another 2 – 3 years will pass until a enterprise quality release of Ubuntu with this feature set will appear.
Most enterprises I’ve worked with would consider these features requirements of any desktop operating system.
Nor will it support out of the box the enterprise standard for wireless authentication, WPA.
That is a shame, since the latest version of NetworkManager does support WPA, but isn’t included in Dapper.
LDAP is not an authentication system. It is a directory system. There is a huge difference between the two.
Directory systems are often used to store authentication information. When an authentication system utilizes information stored in a directory system accessed using the LDAP protocol it is commonly refered to as LDAP authentication. Technically you are correct that the directory system is just a storage system for the authentication system. I’ll try to be more semanticly correct in the future and not use common meanings.
I think most people understood that I was talking about utilizing LDAP, AD, or NIS(+) as data sources for the multiple authentication systems commonly used on a linux system. Also the Ubuntu specification (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkAuthentication) refers to LDAP as an authentication method so, doing so here is consistent with the terminology used by the product in question.
If we are going to be semantic, LDAP is not a directory system. LDAP is a protocol for accessing directory systems. OpenLDAP, Fedora Directory Server, Novell eDirectory, and Microsoft Active Directory would be examples of directory systems. All of the mentioned directory servers are accessable using the LDAP protocol. Novell eDirectory and Active Directory are also accessable utilizing protocols besides LDAP.
I’m working at Kubuntu Breezy and it is a bit unstable.
this could really help Ubuntu. Put up with a six week delay and get a highly polished distro released…..get the big contracts and rollouts that Ubuntu should have….get more developers working on the extended ‘enterprise’ features some want ‘out of the box’ and with those extra developers, get back onto the Mar/Oct release schedule.
Of course, it could all go pear-shaped and we end up with a yearly Jun release schedule…..
the reasons for the delay are sound, and I think it’s a good idea – especially if it doesn’t screw up the syncing of the rest of the releases
Should it be called 6.06?