Shuttleworth gets cloudy with Ubuntu 9.10 Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, has christened the next iteration of its Linux distro. It's called the Karmic Koala, and he says that the future release, due in October as Ubuntu 9.10, will have features that allow companies to build their own compute clouds. The announcement of the future release was posted …
"Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, has christened the next iteration of its Linux distro. It's called the Karmic Koala, and he says that the future release, due in October as Ubuntu 9.10, will have features that allow companies to build their own compute clouds."
Uh, Mark, I dunno what color the sky is on your planet (brown, maybe?), but companies have been building and deploying centralized computing since before you were born. We've moved on. It's an ancient technology that doesn't really work in real life anymore, outside of places where huge amounts of I/O are necessary (weather forecasting, ocean currents & tidal movements in estuaries, automated tellers, POS systems, inventories for national chains, whatever the NSA is doing, Google, Amazon, twitbookchanspace/.reg, and etc.).
Talk about jumping on a bandwagon ... What is it with these ex-Debian folks, anyway? I know they are very young, and don't have a lot of real world knowledge about how computers are used ... but are they really so caught up in themselves that they think they have earned clues simply because they managed to make a lot of money off of the back of Linus?
Me, I built & run a horse ranch for my retirement ... Shuttleworth is a space cadet.
Do the math.
"Wow ... Ubuntu's release codenames are getting sillier with each release." .... By Nick Posted Sunday 22nd February 2009 00:52 GMT
Nick,
One man's silliness is another man's stealth. And it is most very Probable that Windows is Readied for to be Rocked and Defrocked/Fragged in the Novel Cloud Space Processing.
Ziggy meets ZigZag for a Web of Spiders at Victoria Falls, I presume, Dr Shuttleworth? :-)
And apparently Eucalyptus is an Effective Barrier against Midges and Gnats, which are sort of Mosquitoes.
"The Eucalyptus project is actually an acronym that stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, which explains why UCSB should be banned from naming anything for at least five years." ..... :-) Whenever it is so close to Perfect as makes no Difference in Transparent Steganography, GWB would probably have given them a medal and a bomber jacket.
[And Paris because Seventh Heaven is a Perfumed Garden exploding in a Riot of Colour with Sticky Sweet Earthly Powers in All Manner of such Exotic Erotic Flowers ......... Manna indeed .... 4AIManna2 in Binary Deeds for Systems Management.] ....... which would be the Optional Proffered Max Volume Preferred Root Route for the Real High Flying Cybernaut/InterNetional Space Station Cosmonaut.
Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Karmic Koala. Yeah, pretty silly.
Could be worse though, I heard off a friend of a friend's cousin's brother in-law's sister's pet chinchilla that Microsoft's codename for Vista was Constipated Chimp.
Even if it wasn't, it probably should have been.
Paris, Fellatio Fawn.
I have various laptops running variants of Ubuntu and the 2 problems are always getting the sound cards to work with Skype and getting wpa working.
It is getting better by the day but wpa is totally essential these days and should be as easy to set up as a wired connection.
Keep up the good work
I'm a big fan of ubuntu & other nix variants but agreed my main gripes with hardy are inability to get correct screen resolution on a 15inch widescreen Dell laptop, adobe flash is still not working, having to install a bunch of additional codecs to listen to mp3's and being totally unable to get a wifi connection to a wep secured bt-homehub via network mgr (iwconfig/iwlist/ dhclient works fine).
Most people who haven't done software engineering or sys admin for years would find these issues very annoying.
"Will fonts still look like a Dogs Dinner?"
I agree that not everyone will like the default fonts. So just goto Applications > Add/Remove, type 'fonts' in Search and install 'Ubuntu Restricted Extras' and 'Microsoft Core Fonts'. This gives you all the true type fonts, if you want. Problem solved.
"Will the hopeless netmanager have been replaced by something which works as well as wicd - wicd for instance?"
wicd doesn't do much though does it. The new network manager allows wireless, vpn, bluetooth, mobile broadband etc. Better to improve it rather than downgrade it.
Plymouth will be a great addition though.
Personally I'm more interested in what comes after Koca Kola Koala. Be a bit cheeky if it was Little Leopard. Heh.
Going to be Llama though isn't Laughing Llama or Leaping Llama.
Boring!
"It's no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty - during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs,"
amanfromMars...is that you?
Who cares about the name. Call it Ubuntu 9.10 if it embarrasses you.
I love Ubuntu; hardly ever use Windows on my laptop any more, and never on my server. I just get a bit pissed off that something that worked in Kernel 2.6.27-7 (Intel 833C Sound) stopped in 2.6.27-9 and wasn't fixed in -11. I understand if something doesn't work at the begining, but not when it has worked from the begining and suddenly stops. Luckily I have the choice of running the old kernel if I want to hear anything.
...that a koala travels so slow because it's poor tortured digestive system is flat out processing the fermenting cocktail of noxious chemicals and cellulose that its diet consists of. Karmic Kemicalplant might be more appropriate. Dyspeptic Dropbear, why not?
I love our koala - and its terrestrial cousin, the wombat. Their bloody mindedness and their tendency to pee on tourists are an inspiration to us all. Their entire physiology is dedicated to neither fight nor flight but, rather, "just you try to move me, you bastard". The koala, in particular, pigheadedly clings to the notion that it can eke out an existence in a biological niche normally only occupied by sawfly larvae. Consequently it hovers perpetually on the brink of death - desiring nothing more than one last chance to pee on a Brit before it goes. Its cuddly appearance and its smell of eucalyptus laundry freshness make this a common occurrence.
The koala is no warm and fuzzy allegory tying FOSS supercomputing to natures rhythms and cycles. No. The koala is a mean, cantankerous, bastard who will pee on you if he gets the opportunity and if you don't take THAT hint he will cut you, by god. He will cut you!
Love the koala.
Robert, Windows doesn't come with a media player that plays commercial DVDs either. It just so happens that when somebody flogs a computer with Windows and a DVD drive, they tend to preinstall the DVD decryption software (be it by Roxio, Intervideo or whoever - it ain't Microsoft) so that this functionality will be there. I imagine that those OEMs who preinstall Ubuntu on computers do the same. It doesn't mean you'll find it on the Windows CD, any more than it'll be on the Ubuntu CD.
Oh, and @AC and Chika: Good ideas, but let's not be sexist: every other release will have to be "Wobbling Wanger", "Jaunty Johnson" etc.
>wicd doesn't do much though does it.
It works, actually it 'just works' - and perfectly on the half dozen laptops I've stuck it on. Numpties are able use it - move between wireless networks, create and save profiles, hibernate, suspend and avoid a myriad of other basic fallovers which NM introduces in new and interesting ways with each release.
> agree that not everyone will like the default fonts. So just goto Applications > Add/Remove, type 'fonts' in Search and install 'Ubuntu Restricted Extras' and 'Microsoft Core Fonts'.
Thank god for MS then - trouble is these decades old fonts are also dog awful (have you looked at a Mac recently?, personally I won't have one in the house, but nonetheless that's the real world competition). And I'm afraid sub-pixel hinting on a decent display is only a lesser degree of worse.
I'm not a target user but I know plenty of them - I'd love to see my kids school saving fortunes, relatives who pester me endlessly for 'Windows discs' and so on using Ubuntu. But, its not going to happen without fundamentals like wireless which works, web pages with typography which is readable even, forget attractive (I mean pleeease - 'not everyone will like...' visit any page using Times from a default install and say that with a straight face) .
I'm not proposing that's these issues are insurmountable if users want to tweak - options are staggeringly plentiful on any flavour of Linux, IF you have the interest - simple fact is that the folk who Ubuntu is supposed to be for don't - in fact already expect far, far more coming from near 7-year old XP - and that's quite a scarey concept.
I could make the same criticism about the hideous themes, shoddy graphic design in general, lack of effort in respect of Fusion setup, decent media player with pretty visualisations, a game or two which looks like it was written this century etc etc.
These things matter greatly to non-ITs who's idea of configuration is changing a screensaver (oh yeah that's another thing) or adding a photo of Aunty Flo to the desktop - and they matter far more than living in the clouds with everyone's favourite space cadet.
DVD playback is a one click install for all distros, takes 10 seconds, less time than it took you to write about it.
It's not a GNU/Linux problem, it's Hollywood control of the film distribution industry and the DMCA. Not a bad description here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss
Mine's the one with the DeCCS Haiku written on the back
Vista does play DVDs out of the box. Stick in DVD. Load media player. Bosh.
I may also be one of the few people who prefers Media Player to most other players. Everything else (including VLC) has codec or video/audio synching issues at times. That's providing the codecs don't get mucked up, of course..
From my point of view, Ubuntu badly needs a better recovery console. If the X configuration gets mucked up/Nvidia binary drivers don't install properly, it'll drop you at a command prompt with no guide on what to do. That may be barely acceptable when you've hacked X config files by hand in the past, but for an average user it needs some serious improvement - at the very least provide a VESA X server fallback and a set of X based recovery tools.
Let's face it, outside of the server room and the bedrooms of a few uber-geeks, that is where Linux will languish. If Shuttleworth wants to get more adoption, he should spend less time spouting marketing pish and more time making the OS easier to use. When I install something from the repository, why do I have to grub about in a terminal to make it work?
I have a GUI, I installed it via a GUI, I want to use my GUI to control it. I want me menus installed automatically so I don't have to arse around and create my own launcher. I do not want to have to find obscure config files and edit them by hand before I can do anything. That is what the GUI is for! This is not hard to do at all and greatly eases the use of the system.
Linux is losing presence in the mini-laptop category where it almost had the entire market to itself, and it lost it through the traditional elitist, new-user-hostile, Linux way of doing things (which is; drop to terminal, use badly documented commands to fetch raw source, compile, fiddle with configs in vi and pray).
No wonder the TCO for Windows units is so much lower than Linux ones (before the freetards start baying about license costs, that's less that 10% of the total. Retraining your entire workforce on how to use a command line is going to cost so much more).
Until Linux has deployments have properly working (and stable; KDE is worse that Windows ME!) GUIs, they can forget any presence bar the billy-no-mates types.
As I have said here before a Dell 820 supplied to me by Microsoft didn't "just work", the wireless didn't register. A live Disk of Ubuntu proved the wireless was OK and so was a Windows driver issue.
My Rock Pegasus 665 runs Ubuntu 8.10 not only does everything just work the system software helped me analyse concerns I was having with the hardware, something the Windows supplied software could not. Oh, and the wireless works and an update of Totem and install of libdvdcss was a quick and easy way to play DVDs.
A friends Acer Aspire 5935, labouring a wee bit under Vista, became much more responsive with a LIVE CD (not an install) a LiveCD of Ubuntu 8.10, and yes, that included the wireless.
I still use Windows for games (until I get into Wine next month), but I am fairly happy with Linux for everyday life.
when its a damn good OS they make.
all of you who diss it because of the name, put up or shut up. unless there is a proven link between the name of the release and its functionality, your whinings are pointless and irritating. and a little fun is healthy, stop being so damn anal.
also to most of the other small gripes, I agree of course its not perfect, but when you get it for free and a new release every 6 months that improves every time, isnt it worth a bit of tinkering to sort out these problems?
I'm not going to be a twat and say "works for me" but the great thing about all linuxes is that if it doesnt work, you can fix it. rather than reinstalling or calling a premium tech support hotline like with *some* oses we could mention :) .
random tangent: I was actually asked to click on "start" when talking to an insurance rep the other day..... I told him you don't get a mouse on the CLI :)
There was a setting I had to add to /etc/modules (?) to get sound going on my ASUS laptop, also Intel chipset. Problem was something like the 3D sound had everything panned away from the normal stereo output or something similar. Sounhd was there but incredibly faint.
Can't get at the setting cos I'm at work and the laptop is switched off 60 miles away else I'd paste the config line for you :o(
Hope this helps give you something to google for at least
Am I the only one who has managed to get Ubby working out of the box on almost any hardware I have to hand? I have run it on Compaq Deskpro with dual-screen split Nvidia card. An ACER aspire one mini, a HP pavilion desktop, even my old ASUS mini.
The worst thing I have had to do with any of these is remember my 17 character WPA password so I can get out the house onto "da net". CD in, starts up. Install and reboot. Tweak the odd setting to get it just right and start using it. Even running dual-screen 19" screens of a bizarre HDMI nvidia grpahics card, worked perfect. Select Nvidia driver, select split screen Xinerama, reboot. Working perfect!
Stop all the FUD. I gave up on RedHat 5.1, 6.2 and 7.2 they were atrocious, these days a lot better.
For he last time....IT IS NOT WINDOWS! IT DOESN'T WORK LIKE WINDOWS!
Other than the similarities between OSX, Amiga, GEM desktop and Windows, Linux is it's own beast and should be treated as it's own entity!
"It works, actually it 'just works' - and perfectly on the half dozen laptops I've stuck it on. Numpties are able use it - move between wireless networks, create and save profiles, hibernate, suspend and avoid a myriad of other basic fallovers which NM introduces in new and interesting ways with each release."
NM saw a very large improvement in the Ibex release, that can't really be denied can it. It's also just as numptie friendly as Windows network manager and wicd so that's not an entirely fair comment me thinks.
"Thank god for MS then - trouble is these decades old fonts are also dog awful (have you looked at a Mac recently?, personally I won't have one in the house, but nonetheless that's the real world competition). And I'm afraid sub-pixel hinting on a decent display is only a lesser degree of worse."
Let me get this straight. You dislike ubuntu's default fonts, but also think MS fonts are dog awful, so that's not going to work for you. You seem to like Apple fonts but won't have one in the house!
This isn't really working for us is it.
I'm afraid I can't help you. Sorry you'll have to go back to using pen and paper. Best of luck.
they can't (won't) support MP3, DVD etc out of the box and why there's no iTunes, but 99.99% of people don't give a damn.
I'd switch to Ubuntu like a shot if it would allow me to manage my iPhone. Or my old Creative PMP. Users want their OS to work straight away, with all the hardware they've got.
ome won't mind clicking on a few install buttons - but to say "we don't want to support iPhones (or MP3 or any other 'restricted-but-not-really-coz-you-can-install-it-anyway packages) because they're closed and that's not we're about, dude" puts ideology over usability.
Plus, my monitor only ever reports itself as 640 x 480. Easy to fix in Windows - just update the monitor device to a generic 1280 x 1024 panel. But ast time I tried to use Ubuntu, there was simply no fix for it.
It's a licensing issue; people claim they own particular ways of doing sums, and are backed up by legislation.
Ubuntu cannot distribute those codecs, not without paying money to the codec "owners" and that would mean Ubuntu CDs cannot be freely given away and redistributed.
The codec "owners" allow end users to install their software themselves -- they want their codecs used after all; they mainly want to charge media companies for using them -- and Ubuntu makes this quick, intuitive and easy. This hardly "puts ideology over usability".
I know why codecs etc are not pre-installed and that's fine. I don't understand why decss is not only not installed but requires stepping out of the normal installation system to get it running.
As to Windows not coming with full media support - I don't care; it doesn't even come with a compiler so as far as I'm concerned it's a toy system and I don't use toy systems. I was trying Ubuntu on a laptop to see if it was a viable low-maintenance/fast-install option instead of Gentoo which I normally use.
I'm actually very happy with it, but the DVD glitch just seemed pointless even in light of the various stupid patents and laws that our wonderful politicians have approved while they got on with the important job of sailing the economy into the biggest iceburg they could find.
...how much heat Linux stories make when you consider that Linux is only on about 2% of PCs and 70% run Windows XP. (Source: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php)
It's just like car-nuts getting really excited about a new Ferrari, even though there is no way they could afford to run one.
Pointless.
Mr Anon.cowerard,
You appear to be critical of Ubuntu from a distance, talking about needing to use a command line
It is much the same as Windows XP, you know that it has a command iine don't you.
It is just above the Start button you use to shut down
You are only about 4/5 years out of date
I can't resist it, I shall use the term Ignorant idiot to describe you.
Peace and Joy to you.
More personal insults from the a Linux user, sheesh. Is it any wonder that adoption is so low with people like you hindering the cause. You make assumptions and you attack me rather than rebut anything I have said; pretty common of Linux users it is sad to say. Some less than glowing facts are brough up about the penguinand you lash out, rather than thinking and debating like an adult.
Yes Windows has a command line but it only needs to be accessed for very particular, system related tasks. The average user does not need to touch it (or even know about it). The average user can do everything from a clear, consistent and easy to use GUI. This is not the case with Linux where even simple installs/configurations require access to the command line more often than not. And even if there is a relevant GUI, often only the command line is actually documented and new users are left to struggle.
Hence the TCO for Windows being lower and hence companies selecting Windows for average end-users over Linux. Windows lets you get your job done - it really is that simple.
Next time, kindly leave the ad hominem attacks at home and debate the facts.
>Let me get this straight. You dislike ubuntu's default fonts, but also think MS fonts are dog awful, so that's not going to work for you. You seem to like Apple fonts but won't have one in the house!
Actually boxes I've setup look drop dead and work pretty well, that's not the point I'm making at all - its the fact that it needs to be done, on a supposed consumer desktop.I don't like Macs simply because they are closed and overpriced, not because they aren't functional, usable or attractive.
"Actually boxes I've setup look drop dead and work pretty well, that's not the point I'm making at all - its the fact that it needs to be done, on a supposed consumer desktop.I don't like Macs simply because they are closed and overpriced, not because they aren't functional, usable or attractive."
Need to give it a bit more time. Ubuntu's doing pretty well for it's 4th year. Consider the fact that 2 years or even 1 year ago we wouldn't be having this conversation because Linux was in no way ready for the desktop market then. It's moved pretty far in a short time, from the days when trying to run RedHat 6 on the desktop was enough to make you come out in hives.
Happily it looks like Canonical are going to throw a bag of spare change at the GUI in the next couple of releases, which I will look forward too. I don't think they will be paying to include Lucinda Grande as a system font, (just tried it very nice) but Bitstream Vera Sans is pretty damn close to it. Just needs tweaking.
Nope, $ sudo displayconfig-gtk didn't work. Nor did the many, many hours I spent on ubuntuforums.org trying the various suggestions.
But there's another issue here: it's fine to say that with tinkering, there's always a way. But how many people actually want to tinker? And if you fuck-up your X-server in the process, anyone but a Linux expert is screwed. It comes back to this: people want it to 'just work'.
From what I can see, no-one's got iPhone support working yet without jailbraking the iPhone itself. And that makes my iPhone run like a Vista machine with 512Mb RAM.
sorry to hear it didn't work. you could try
sudo nvidia-settings
if you have an nvidia board.
i agree with you actually. it does take a bit of dicking around to fix a broken x-server sometimes.
some hardware / hardware combinations just dont work sometimes. I have ubuntu on 2 machines, on my desktop its a pain in the arse to configure because of various hardware and driver issues, but on my laptop with its mobillity radeon hd24-something graphics and all intel sound / network etc, it works beautifully, even got half life 2 running on it.
regardless, its always improving, im sure given a few improvements / new releases in the future one of them will "just work" for you. and tbh iphones are sooo proprietry and locked down that its propbably illegal to get one working with linux in the first place :)
however someone will probably do it even without the 'jailbreaking' part - that prediction being dependant on enough linux experts owning iphones :)
At the end of the day, if its worth £300 / [insert pctax figure for your machine here] / breaking the law (pirating) to you to get your iphone sync'd up with your pc, windows fits the bill. otherwise, ubuntu rules \m/
one more point i wanted to make - if windows didn't make such a big thing about wiping the user's arse for them at every turn, then IMHO windows users would be alot better at configuring things and using the CLI, and so could probably sort out something as technical as a broken x server.
the problem here is balance between control and ease of use - in microshaft's latest incarnation of windows, you have no control. every measure is taken to prevent the user from doing anything but use the system, and we have to just trust that the os does everything it should do, and "just works". when it doesnt, you are screwed unless you want to part with more hard earned cash, or attempt a reinstall (subject to legal conditions as set out in the eula).
with linux, we have absolute control. yes linux refuses to go around wiping people's arses, but with good reason. they should'nt be so damn lazy. and if it did, it would soon be out of toilet roll.
armed with the linux forums and the abillity to fix things rather than reinstall or give up, i find the linux desktop environment to be unbeatable.
no trolling intended :)
I cant wait to see how this works out.
Its obvious that things cant go on the way they are, what with school having to pay so much towards their IT budgets (I'd prefer they spent the money on REAL things like facilities, buildings, heating, and teachers salaries).
Ubuntu is the only OS on my own PC, and those of many of my friends who are not very tech minded. Keep up the good work Mr Shuttleworh!
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