For you review freaks out there: “All the Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) reviews you can dream of. So far reviews from Linux.com, Arsgeek, Lunapark6, Element14, mo79online, sencer.de, Manufactured Enviroments, first impressions at Technical Itch and the Ubuntu forums and screenshot tours at TheCodingStudio and several blog entries.”
kinda similar. And no news for someone that has used ubuntu for a while i guess.
How in-depth could a reviewer possibly get after only two days with the product?
Edgy is a worthwhile upgrade, if you’re looking to run a desktop with the most recent versions of your favorite programs and don’t require the long-term support offered by Dapper, but it’s not as adventurous as one might have hoped.
And if it had, do you have any idea how much screaming and wailing we’d be listening to right now when something breaks?
Beagle isn’t even installed by default, though it has already been in other distros for some time.
And for that, Ubuntu devs, I salute you for holding onto a shred of common sence when the rest of the Linux world seems to have lost it’s mind and insists on putting mono based crap all over a perfectly good system.
Edited 2006-10-29 23:35
No kidding. I think Beagle is interesting, but it would be infinitely better if it had been created in a different language, I think.
Well, it probably wouldn’t have existed. C# is a very fast language to program in and allowed them to build up the search system very quickly. and start working on making it a feature complete engine. It would take FAR longer to get the search engine created and to try things out, see what works, etc…
er, two of the new default apps are mono – fspot and tomboy.
I did an upgrade from Dapper to Edgy as documented on Edgy web site. i would say that I am lucky, that I did a save of my home folder. The X-server went for a toss. I had to uninstall and reinstall many xorg packages.
Even then, my display is gittery, X is taking too much of CPU time and memory.
Then it was the turn of my wireless connection. Its kind of funny, but If I boot through my Dapper Live CD I have wireless connection, but with Upgraded Edgy — No way.
I have previously done upgrade from Breezy to Dapper, it was as smooth as a new install and I loved Ubuntu for it. Maybe Canonical went tooo “Edgy” this time.
Mind it I am no Linux newbie and have been using it since 3 years. On my desktop I have Arch Linux and everything configured properly.
I loved Dapper, but Edgy might make me have Arch even on Laptop.
before that I want to go in for a fresh install of Edgy , I really hope it works.
Beyond a couple of hiccups to my wine configuration and synaptic everything went smoothly.
I have no doubt the two problems I did encounter (and already fixed) were the result of my own doing as I had previously tweaked them pretty hard on my own.
My only complaint was the amount of time it took to upgrade. I thought Windows took a long time… I could have re-formatted my HD, installed Windows XP and had all my applications and data back up and running in probably half the time it took for me to upgrade to Edgy. I didn’t even do an upgrade over the network – I used an alt install CD.
Other than the wait I’ve got no complaints though, damn fine job!
“It’s fun to take a trip.
Put acid in your veins.”
Edgy Eft needed more QA work. Upgrading (as opposed to clean installs) is one of the main advantages of a Linux desktop. I don’t think it’s OK for an upgrade of one of the most prominent Linux desktop distro’s to resemble the “fun” I usually have with my “unstable” Debian home box.
I’ve coaxed a number of people during the last days upgrade from Breezy and it’s fortunate I supervised the move. On one occasion the automatic network connection was dropped. On another, the upgrade stripped the NVidia binary driver but neglected to replace “Driver ‘nvidia'” with “Driver ‘nv'” in xorg.conf, leaving the system unusable for that user’s level of expertise. Not to mention the upgrade process freezing once during the initialization phase, or refusing to go on because of a couple of lines in source.list it didn’t like (that it added itself!)
To Ubuntu’s defence, their update model doesn’t shove upgrades down anybody’s throat. Upgrading requires a voluntary effort, that regular users wouldn’t normally make. If I had left those people alone they’d still be running Breezy without a problem.
The installer in Edgy has definitely taken a backwards step in my book. For one I could always fall back on the “safe graphics” Grub boot option to boot the live CD and then carry on through the installation process. Attempting this with Edgy I’m still left with an X server won’t start error.
Is the text installer still available with the alternative ISO image?
Yes
has never once worked out well for me using *buntu. I don’t mean the command itself, I mean moving from one point release to another via dist-upgrade. I think it’s more or less a given that if you want to run one of the 6-month wonder distros, you’re going to be reinstalling every so often. Some people have no problem upgrading, most folks I know do/did. I think Edgy is probably the best release of *buntu to date – I certainly have found it the most user friendly and most polished of any I have tried, and I have tried all of them, including warty. While I think that *all* of the release-every-6-months distros need to put some serious work into their upgradeability, I don’t think it is at all fair to judge a release by how bad a time you had upgrading to it.
That being said, I’m not sure how long it’s going to last on my lappy – I’m already itching to install Frugalware or arch. *buntu’s level of (intrusive) hand-holding userfriendly is awesome for my wife (really – and Edgy is fantastic in this respect), but it just puts a crick in my spine.
I too had problems with the upgrade, on both an AMD64 desktop and a ppc iBook. Fortunately, I did a complete backup on both systems, so I could afford to wipe them clean and reinstall cleanly. Once that was out of the way, Edgy seems to me to be faster and more stable — some annoying glitches I had with Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office on the AMD64 machine seem to be gone now, and they are running quite smoothly. Suspend and hibernate also seems to work better on the iBook.
For those who can’t reinstall, and who expect to just upgrade, it looks like 6.10 is going to be trouble.
Ubuntu isn’t really user friendly when you consider how frequently you must visit the terminal to perform tasks.
Frugalware and Arch are really a step down because they only have a tiny fraction of the software available to Ubuntu users.
Quantity vs Quality applies here, I think – not that debian/ubuntu don’t have quality builds, but that there is a lot of serious cruft in the 30k touted packages. Not to mention that it is fairly easy to write a buildscript that will allow you to install *anything* on either of these systems which will be managed by pacman. That said, I cannot think of a single piece of software I have wanted to install on Arch that wasn’t available in either the main repos or the AUR. Suffice it to say I like both of these distros more than I like *buntu – that’s my preference, and to me it’s not a “step down” to use a distro I prefer.
CLI is a fact of life with linux – Free doesn’t come for free. That won’t change. That said, I do believe that Kubuntu at least is pretty damn newb friendly. There are other distros that are equally so, most likely. I never meant to state that it was *THE MOST USER FRIENDLY!!!* only that it was nicely done in many ways.
Yes, but if you don’t know what you are doing, it will bite you…
I have upgraded from 5.04 all the way to Edgy, so, pardon me while I look at a lack of skill on the parts of the people who upgraded and broke things
One of *buntu’s aims is to be user friendly. Blaming an end-user for a “lack of skill” when the party line is “Change the repos and do a dist upgrade” is silly. I don’t even see that kind of thing being thrown around on the Arch forums, where people deal with breakage frequently if they don’t keep their ears to the ground.
On the other hand, you might be a hardcore kernel hacker badass, in which case I bow to your level of knowledge/skill. I still wouldn’t expect the average end-user to be able to pull it off.
From a personal standpoint, I’m a linux sysadmin, I’ve been using linux in some way or another since the 90s, and run Arch, Slack, debian, kubuntu and redhat. I don’t think a lack of skill on my part is why a dist upgrade completely fux0r3d my box any of the times it has. I admit that I generally didn’t put a lot of effort into fixing a broken install either. I’d just do a clean install and restore from backups.
You make me snore.
You lost at “the party line”, because it isn’t.
Disclaimers about knowing what you are doing, ability to debug apt-get errors, etc abound. Same as with Windows: upgrades don’t work well unless you tweak them. Clean installs are the only way to go for the newbie.
last time i posted a comment on a ubuntu topic i got voted down for what i thought was a reasonable comment. this time im gunna say what i should have then. for any linux user that has been using linux since before ubuntu was around. ubuntu is a waste of time. for any linux user just starting out, ubuntu is o.k. but its almost as locked and unchangeable as windows, its more of an ‘ubuntu way or the highway’ setup then debian. and as far as im concerned the ubuntu comunity will run you out before they let you say one spec of constructive critisim about them. if yur new, start somewhere else, if yur not, dont bother.
Well could you give at least a single example what you cannot change in ubuntu and can in debian?
Actually, I agree with you. I moved from PCLinuxOS to Ubuntu on my primary workstation when Dapper 6.06.1 was released. Anyone who has ever used PCLOS knows their forums are bar none when it comes to friendly, warm, helpful people (perhaps due in no small part to the average age of their user base, which is ~40.) I’ve found the Ubuntu forums to be filled with impatient, cold, and sometimes outright rude people. Further, there are so many forum goers that posted threads are quickly buried with few or no responses. The one good thing about this is that I end up finding my own solutions. I haven’t upgraded to Edgy Eft because i’m happy with my perfectly tweaked and stable Dapper. By most accounts i’ve read, upgrading is too risky at best and a disaster waiting to happen at worst. I can wait until the next “stable” release or choose another, better distro if I choose.
“Actually, I agree with you. I moved from PCLinuxOS to Ubuntu on my primary workstation when Dapper 6.06.1 was released. Anyone who has ever used PCLOS knows their forums are bar none when it comes to friendly, warm, helpful people”
So true. I’m in a very similar situation, trying out Ubuntu Edgy Eft and possibly moving from PCLOS, because of the better foreign language support and because I want to be familiar with a mainstream distro, besides the fact that it feels a bit awkward to promote a distro with such a name among my pals ;D. But I must confess I feel kind of guilty because PCLinuxOS people are so friendly.
I must say that, so far, I like Edgy. Automatix2 did all the “dirty” work (installing proprietary codecs and the like) and I can play 3d games such as Nexuiz with my ATI Radeon without the proprietary drivers, which I couldn’t until today. So finally it seems that Ubuntu is getting as user-friendly as it was promoted.
“””I’ve found the Ubuntu forums to be filled with impatient, cold, and sometimes outright rude people.”””
Are you sure you went to the right forum? It was Ubuntu’s warm and helpful forums, as much as the distro itself, which sold me on Ubuntu as the distro I recommend to newbies.
The only nasty post I ever recall seeing there was our very own kernelpanicked’s farewell post, which accused us all of not forcing new users to RTFM enough, and so he was off to try Fedora. (Judging from his recent posts here, I would guess that the level of RTFMing on FC’s mailing list is adequate for his tastes.)
Other than that, the Ubuntu forums have been nothing but pleasant and exceedingly helpful. At least, from my point of view.
What you’ve said is exactly the good thing about Linux or opensource. If you want to choose a power distro and configure everything manually for specific use or because you think it’s fun, great! Choose Slackware, Gentoo or even Debian.
If, on the other hand, you want to just get a CD that should hopefully configure your computer and install most software you’ll need and then after it’s working, the most you’re going to change is your wallpaper… why not choose Ubuntu? While you might think Ubu is a ‘waste of time’, my father might think that apt-get install xserver-xorg gnome, etc. is a waste of time when he could just get another CD that does it for him.
I think it’s fair to say that for every user who wants the power of Debian or the configurability of Gentoo, there’s one or more users who want the simplicity of Ubuntu, Mac OS X or whatever.
I think it’s fair for the Ubuntu devs to make their way of doing things the most supported way of doing things on their distro, where the highway option is one of the several hundred other distros or even your own. They’re trying to make a system that will do most things for most people,.. whether they’ve succeeded or will succeed is relative.
This is the first Ubuntu version where my wireless worked out of the box for me. That saved me from the aggravation of compiling the modules, etc… I have an ACX111 card.
but the thing is theres better lesser known distros out there witht he same goals as ubuntu, but they didnt have endless money to through around backing them so they will stay lesser known. things like PCLOS, MEPIS (before the switch), LYCORIS before its purchase, MANDRAKE before they impeached the founder… well maybe you might be correct, maybe there isnt a lot left in the n00b friendly linux arena, im not saying there isnt a place for distros like this, just that there is better distros in both directions, n00b friendly or hard core.
After reading some comments here, I have one question: why is Mono so criticized inside open-source community? Please, I don’t wanna start a flame war – I really don’t know anything about Mono, and any clarification is very welcome.
Mono is an open source clone of Microsoft .NET. Since Microsoft is to the F/OSS community as garlic is to a vampire, people tend to not like it as much. Personally, I think Mono is a great idea as it provides a platform on which to run (hopefully) some of .NET’s fruits.