back to article Ubuntu 12.04 LTS strikes Hyper-V first with Microsoft

There’s a little love and yet a lot of rivalry between the latest Ubuntu build and Microsoft's Windows. For servers Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, released on Thursday, has been engineered to run on Redmond’s Hyper-V, the Windows 2008 Server virtualization engine. On the desktop Canonical thinks its changes around thin-client computing …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    I, for one, welcome...

    ... our new, er, Pangolin overlords...

  2. Nanki Poo
    Facepalm

    errr . . .

    Too tired to look it up at mo, but didn't LTS always have 5-year supoport? It's the in-betweens that have/had three shurely...?

    nK

    1. Jordan Davenport

      Re: errr . . .

      LTS releases had 3 years' support on the desktop and 5 years' support on the server until this release. This is the first release to have 5 years' support on both. Non-LTS releases have 18 months' support only. Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS) and Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) will both lose support on the desktop in about a year from now, but Ubuntu Server 10.04 will continue to be supported for two years after that.

  3. tom dial Silver badge
    Linux

    "Microsoft released Linux device driver code from Hyper-V under the GNU Public Licence in 2009 to"

    comply with GPL requirements and

    "improve performance and management of Linux as a guest operating system running in a virtualised Windows environment."

    Fixed.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Linux that Windows shops will want?

    Quote

    On the desktop Canonical thinks its changes around thin-client computing will make this the Linux that Windows shops will want.

    Ha-ha.... Ha-ha....

    Ever spent hours and hours trying to get Oracle to run properly on Ubuntu? You have to literally blindside the installer.

    ditto for a whole host of other packages

    Products like Oracle and WebSphere can indeed be made to run on Ubuntu but try getting any form of support for any Linux other than SUSE or RHEL...

    RHEL now has 10 years of support. LTS is rather 'mid term support' IMHO.

  5. bigfoot780
    FAIL

    IE6

    Just think oft he fun trying to get your IE6 only apps running on firefox/chrome/etc. Like it or not XP is going to be around for years. Unless you thinapp IE6. All M$ had to do was put a GPO in for disabling that horrible start screen in PRO/ENT.

    1. Miek
      Linux

      Re: IE6

      Fcuk IE6, all who sail her and all sites that pander to her!

  6. Shannon Jacobs
    Holmes

    Freedom is really about meaningful choice

    It's not that I like Ubuntu so much as I love freedom and dislike such anti-choice anti-freedom corporations as Microsoft. For that reason, I really hoped that Ubuntu would succeed. Unfortunately and based on many years of use, I have to conclude that Ubuntu is NOT succeeding. The quality of Microsoft's software doesn't matter as long as their economic models work--and they obviously do.

    My experience is that Ubuntu peaked about 4 years ago. It was quite usable and functional, and even something that I could recommend as a possible alternative to Microsoft or Apple. Since then, it has slid downhill, and there is nothing I can do about it. It seems the best think I could do would be to provide some money to support the OLD and more functional versions of Ubuntu, but that is NOT an option. However, I suspect that there are a lot of people who feel the same way, and it is rather unfortunate that there is no mechanism to let us do so.

    I still believe a system like this could be adapted to such purposes:

    http://eco-epistemology.blogspot.jp/2009/11/economics-of-small-donors-reverse.html

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Pretty strange Ubuntu hasn't been more successful

    Linux has done well in servers (although primarily at the expense of Sun Microsystems instead of Microsoft). It has done very well in mobile. It, at least at this point, has not been able to break MS's stranglehold on the desktop OS market.

    I think the diversification of client OSs, OS X, iOS, Android, etc, will make it more difficult for MS to hang on to paid licenses on the desktop. People are going to start writing ultra-portable applications that run on the server and can be rendered on a browser on any client OS. At that point, all technical requirements for Windows will be gone. Then the CIOs will have to explain to the CFO why they should pay $x million to refresh their PCs with Windows instead of nothing for Linux, which at that point will probably be working well in Droid form on their mobile client devices.

    1. Miek
      Thumb Up

      Re: Pretty strange Ubuntu hasn't been more successful

      " People are going to start writing ultra-portable applications that run on the server and can be rendered on a browser on any client OS. At that point, all technical requirements for Windows will be gone. " -- Just like Google have!

    2. PyLETS
      Linux

      Re: Pretty strange Ubuntu hasn't been more successful

      Linux on the desktop being successful depends upon your definition of success. If your definition requires most desktop PCs to use it, then it isn't. On my definition, as a software educator and developer I can get more work done using Linux, then it is. Since when should everyone use the same tools ?

  8. Rambler88
    WTF?

    A fool and his OS . . .

    Next stage: Microsoft starts telling Canonical how to build Ubuntu to maintain compatibility with Hyper-V. This is an old, old story. But only to be expected. Shuttleworth jumped the rails a couple of years go. And today's Ubuntu won't be missed.

  9. toadwarrior

    Ubuntu is mainstream now, we have to hate it. They try new things rather than leaving everything as it was in 1998 when everything was perfect so obviously they suck.

    But I don't care what the hipsters of the linux community thinks. I like Ubuntu so I use it and it's not like you must use unity and even if you did it can't be that bad. Apparently the lastest gnome is shit too as is KDE. It's no wonder no one moves to linux. The most vocal people are the people that hate change and make it out like everything sucks.

    1. Miek
      Linux

      The new Gnome 3 under Ubuntu is shit, I quite like it under Linux Mint

    2. cliveski
      Facepalm

      "it's not like you must use unity and even if you did it can't be that bad"

      Aha! So you haven't used it then?!

      1. John Stirling

        unity

        no, but I have, and do. It has one of the steepest learning curves of any UI I have ever used, but you have to climb it quickly, as until you have you can't even switch the bloody machine off. Once I climbed it, I found that unity slunk into the background, and I could get on with work.

        Do I like unity - hell, why not. Did I like it immediately. Hell no.

        My 'perfect' interface is windows XP, skinned down to look as close to win98 as I can make it, i.e. no themes, narrow menu, task bar, small icons, personalisation switched off.

        Why is that perfect? Because I have used it for bloody years. Can I manage anything else? Of course.

        The world moves on. Unity apparently offers advantage to Canonical, and theoretically to developers, so cool, I'll learn, I'm relatively technical. I have managed to migrate from nokia to blackberry, and thence to android, I can manage unity.

        The question about whether Ubuntu is succeeding is not whether a bunch of hardcore linux heads like Ubuntu, it''s how many paying customers Canonical has for Ubuntu - and those are (apparently) growing, so by the metric that conveys survival probability things are improving.

        1. keithpeter Silver badge
          Pint

          Cog Wheel - Re: unity

          "no, but I have, and do. It has one of the steepest learning curves of any UI I have ever used, but you have to climb it quickly, as until you have you can't even switch the bloody machine off."

          Click the 'cog wheel' icon, select Shut Down...

          Are you shure you didn't mean Gnome Shell?

          http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/brochure/1204-poster

          might help the 'end users' who suddenly find that their 10.04 desktop has been upgraded to 12.04 over the weekend.

        2. keithpeter Silver badge
          Linux

          Sounds like XFCE - Re: unity

          @John Stirling

          My 'perfect' interface is windows XP, skinned down to look as close to win98 as I can make it, i.e. no themes, narrow menu, task bar, small icons, personalisation switched off."

          Try Xubuntu and get rid of that daft bottom dock like panel. Then just add workspace/window buttons to the top bar and bring it down. Install the RedmondXP theme from xfwm4-themes. You can even rename the menu 'Start'

          If you are *really* serious about the Windows 98 bit, try IceWM.

  10. Efros
    Unhappy

    Installed it last night

    After fighting with it to install wifi drivers, and then fighting with it to browse my network I fought with it to stop crashing firefox. After 3 hours of this crap I threw in the towel, Not my happiest Ubu experience by a long chalk.

    1. Tim Brown 1
      Mushroom

      Re: Installed it last night

      Totally agree.

      I tried 12.04 under Virtualbox last night and not only did Unity's lack of configuration options have me tearing my hair out, it ran like a dog under VB (don't have a problem in VB with any other OS). I've been using Ubuntu as my default linux desktop OS for a few years now (using 10.04) but this release did it for me. I started researching alternatives.

      Found Linux Mint which I'd never bothered to look at before. Tried it out and blessed 12.04 for being so bad as to make me do this research :)

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Linux

        Re: Installed it last night

        @Tim Brown 1

        "I tried 12.04 under Virtualbox last night and not only did Unity's lack of configuration options have me tearing my hair out, it ran like a dog under VB (don't have a problem in VB with any other OS)."

        Remember VB may not be running an OpenGL/compiz session, you could be in Unity2d which can be a tad slow. There is more 'unofficial' configuration possible with the Compiz based session, including launcher placement &c.

        1. Tim Brown 1

          Re: Installed it last night

          Quite possibly, but why would I bother to try to 'fix' it, when other distros run without problems out of the box?

    2. keithpeter Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: Installed it last night

      Sounds bad, could you summon any remaining reserves of patience, boot a live session, run sudo lshw and post issues to Ubuntuforums? There are people there who have been hacking the issues through the tesing phase and may have your issues nailed.

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