Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander)
releases.ubuntu.com
releases.ubuntu.com
The release is imminent. Ubuntu is developed in the open, so you get to see candidate release images on the page linked.
Ubuntu is not released until the release is announced. If you're in doubt, expect to see an announcement on the ubuntu-announce mailing list, or its archive at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/
Also see #ubuntu-release-party on Freenode. At the moment, the topic says "... No, it's not out yet | No, we don't have a set time for release"
(written as of Thu, 17 Oct 2013 10:55:59 +0000; obviously this post will become incorrect as soon as it actually is released)
> Ubuntu Server 13.10 with OpenStack Havana, are you ready?
From that page, it is clear that Ubuntu uses the FSF definition of "free" (and quotes it).
The suggestion that Ubuntu will be closed source in the future is FUD. Everything that Canonical ships in Ubuntu is open source with an open bug tracker and open version control.
(with the exception of proprietary drivers and Flash, etc, written outside the project, done for pragmatic reasons and optional with a clear option at installation time; this stuff has not increased but reduced in scope with things like nouveau available now).
[Edit] Actual release announcement: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2013-Octob...
Though mostly "open", but not developed entirely in the right free software / open source spirit of community involvement and upstream contributions.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...
On another project I'm involved in, I've seen Google Groups decide that legitimate posts are spam. Not sure if that's what's happening here, but it's a possibility.
You have a right to say whatever you want.
Anybody have experience with zsync downloads? Is it supposed to update a previous 13.10 Beta ISO, or any previous ISO, e.g. the 13.04 release?
Also, I wonder why they don't use magnet links instead of torrent files.
The practical effect of this is basically the same as a free RAM upgrade!
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-performance/2012-...
If you're going to end up swapping to disk most of the time anyway, the feature doesn't seem to be very useful. But with much faster CPUs, "many core" CPUs where your apps often won't manage to take advantage of the CPUs, and cheap RAM making lots of people buy huge amounts, the "cost" of using compression to offset swapping to disk seems to have dropped substantially, and the chance of avoiding swapping to disk entirely seems to have increased.
$ sudo modprobe zramThe big differences are (a) zswap is in mainline, zram is not, (b) zswap can swap pages out to disk when it's full, zram cannot.
Also, I wouldn't really characterize the difference that zswap makes as a constant, workload-independent percentage performance boost. Rather, it increases the amount of RAM you can use before the system moves from the "acceptable performance" regime (minimal swapping) to the "dismal performance" regime (lots of swapping). For things like running Rails apps on a relatively small VPS, or getting the most out of a limited-RAM machine like an Eee PC or Raspberry Pi, this is very important.
[1] an example: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69928
What I'm really excited about this time around is the launch of Ubuntu Touch, being able to use an open-source OS on my mobile phone.
You can do that now with Firefox OS, and unlike Ubuntu Touch, it's actually developed openly. Ubuntu for phones is open source in the same sense as Android -- developed behind closed doors by a company that doesn't particularly care about community input.
If you think that Ubuntu for phones is really going to be any more open than Android, I expect you'll be disappointed.
- All the Ubuntu Touch specs are public and discussed during a public developer summit online.
- Daily images and snapshots for everyone
- Weekly hangouts with community members and status reports.
- Nearly all of the core apps shipping on the image are community contributed.
It's nice that you are excited about Firefox OS (me too), but seriously there's no need to go around making things up about another OSS project.
Interesting. Can you point me to the online discussion of Mir that took place during the first six months of its development?
> Nearly all of the core apps shipping on the image are community contributed.
... With a mandatory CLA that allows my open-source contributions to be used under a proprietary license by Canonical. See the detailed explanation here [1] on why this is such a big deal.
> seriously there's no need to go around making things up about another OSS project.
The irony of hearing that statement going in the other direction after Canonical's handling of the Mir/Wayland debacle is truly precious. My criticism isn't about promoting FFOS, it's about calling Canonical out on their bad behaviour.
Ubuntu Touch switched to Mir a week ago and was using SurfaceFlinger up until then.
Sure Mir began life as a close proof of concept but has been OSSed for a long time now, certainly long enough to see if it was a good fit for Ubuntu Touch. We could argue whether Mir is now part of Ubuntu Touch or just a component of it but that's just arguing semantics.
> ... With a mandatory CLA that allows my open-source contributions to be used under a proprietary license by Canonical. See the detailed explanation here [1] on why this is such a big deal.
If you don't like signing a CLA you don't have to sign it. You don't have to contribute if you don't want to. You're also free to fork any of the CLA'ed software as you see fit.
> The irony of hearing that statement going in the other direction after Canonical's handling of the Mir/Wayland debacle is truly precious.
Wayland isn't a fit for Ubuntu. In order to deliver the things we want in time for 14.04/14.10 we prefer to maintain our own stack. That's not being any less open than anyone else, it's just how it is, shrug.
Personally I've tried a few distributions over the last year or so because I've been unhappy with unity but Ubuntu's ease of use still makes me return to it, although right now I'm typing this from a Debian box. I didn't like the dreadful* gnome3 speed so switched to i3. Now if I could just work out how to stop the lazy window focus...
The trouble is is that it looks like a bag of crap right now. The font rendering is all over the place, I'd be embarrassed to use this at home although it is more productive for work than anything else I've used lately.
This might all be "my fault" because I haven't properly installed the right modules or drivers or whatever, or maybe I've not properly set up my Xorg.conf or ~.i3/config but ubuntu always just worked which is why I kept returning to it.
*Possibly because this is a VM running inside windows.
All other packages are updated as well. (Freshly rebased on top of Debian unstable.) So it really depends on what you are doing and which packages you are using.
If you're on 13.04 support ends in January.
So Continuing security patches, bug fixes, and updated features are in it for you.
(3.11) http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.11 (3.10)http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.10 (3.9) http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.9
http://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_focus_follows_mouse
Then again I may be sadly, sadly mistaken.
https://help.ubuntu.com/13.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html
or 12.10:
https://help.ubuntu.com/12.10/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html
and 12.04 is even more sparse!:
https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html
The requested URL /12.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html was not found on this server.
D:
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian raring contrib non-free
$ VirtualBox --help
Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager 4.2.18
There aren't that many top tier distributions to choose from, the main choice is how much time you want packages tested before using them. If you want more testing and older packages, use Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, Redhat/CentOS... but don't stack the deck against Ubuntu by comparing its fresh distro to other people's LTS distros, compare apples to apples.
I just upgraded to an SSD and decided to clean slate rather than carry extra fs creep baggage that isn't linked to a package to remove, but I still have that partition around, and I'm pretty sure if I upgraded it it might still boot.
It is why I like rolling releases - rather than have catastrophic breakage every half year, you continuously migrate upwards. It means occasionally you need to pull up a web browser to see why your desktop is missing, but its better than doing a dist-upgrade and getting an unbootable system.
Today's upgrade was pretty smooth and uneventful.
I've been upgrading Ubuntu Desktop for years (a decade, singular) and I've always been struggling - especially if I ventured to install an alpha and then keep upgrading that. Compared to OS X, on which I always upgrade to the first Developer Preview and keep upgrading on, although OS X comes with problems, too, the GM usually fixes it all up. With Ubuntu, it's best to script your environment and rebuild clean. At least my experience. Garbage always piles up otherwise!
I've found that keeping your old /home around and a copy of installed packages works well enough for most situations.
I often have problems during upgrades using the proprietary drivers. The solution is usually: 1. Uninstall proprietary drivers. 2. Reboot, make sure the fallback mesa/vesa works (i.e. you can boot to graphical login). 3. Install proprietary drivers again. 4. Reboot, make sure the graphical login works, then run glxinfo | grep -i opengl, and make sure the renderer is GeForce or Radeon or whatever, NOT "Mesa".
Yes, it's stupid, and yes, we shouldn't have these problems in 2013, but the proprietary drivers tend to just have more compatibility issues.
Now after my list I have Ubuntu running my home server right now and well it is solid. I use OpenSUSE at work and Arch Linux on my tiny laptop and like those experiences more.
People need to look at OpenSUSE again!
it will take the nearest tag name and use that as the version with the number of commits from that tag as the release value.
Isn't it really beautiful that we actually can do this, now? We can switch platforms within the same day - without real hassle or pain.
I mean tell a Windows or Apple user that they need to look at something else, and guess what their answer will be...
We're about to connect every tiny little aspect of our lives to technology. Everything becomes data that can be stored, measured, interpreted, used for good and nefarious purposes. Code is what manages all these processes. If we let black-box code (closed-source code) control our data, it means we trust those companies and governments who produce this code 100% and beyond the slightest doubt. Given Snowden's revelations about the NSA's abuse of power, it's become pretty obvious that we couldn't make a bigger mistake than trusting nontransparent governments or systems or operating systems or code. Even hardware needs to become open-source sooner or later.
Simple question: Can we ever trust voting machines that are not 100% open-source? Of course not.
Windows needed drivers installing for everything from the network interface up. And I'm still having troubles with the network - I can use wifi fine, but the wired connection refuses to pick up an IP with DHCP.
Ubuntu on the other hand needed a single change to the boot parameters to make screen brightness adjustments work. (Windows also needed a driver for this). Otherwise it works perfectly.
A million times yes.
About a month ago now, my laptop's windows install decided to take a dive so I reinstalled windows and took it as an opportunity to dual boot ubuntu as well. Ubuntu worked out of the box. I'm still finding things that need drivers a month later in windows.
I'm definitely going to wait a little while to see if other people using packages I use have issues, and see what new tricks we have to pull to use Skype, etc.
http://lifehacker.com/5963726/netflix-finally-comes-to-ubunt...
You aren't changing much, just who packaged the software together.
In the linux world you get a combination of 1. low switching costs between competitors (because, as you point out, most of the software is the same), and 2. competition between distributors. With Microsoft and Apple, if you want to choose between competitors, the cost of switching between them is much higher.
> Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream.
I don't think you appreciate how much work does go upstream. Thousands of patches go upstream (eg. http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu_usertag.cgi; and that's just stuff that went directly Debian and was tagged as such). Driver work for new hardware enablements go to the upstream kernel so that Ubuntu developers don't have to maintain it. And Canonical is upstream for a number of projects (eg. they pioneered faster boot speeds with upstart, which went into RHEL). You just don't see this in action because the community works, and work done in one distribution ends up in all the others. So you don't realise how much of the other distribution you're using involves work originally done in Ubuntu.
Only one of five is a default issue and I even declared it a default issue and how I go around defaults.
1. Mir is a huge mistake (My opinion)
2. Unity (Well I am tiled window manager (i3) guy now so all DEs) I really don't like the flow of OS X and it is starting to really look more like OS X. DEFAULT an easily be changed.
3. Lack of community between the Linux ecosystem. Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream.
4. Software Center. They need to just take OpenSUSE's one-click model and get rid of their current model of App Store and the horrible app model. (My model)
5. Their Developer SDK to "Write once, run everywhere." If I had a nickel for every time that was promised (Java looking at you) Once again OpenSUSE Build Service is the most underused Linux tool in the last decade
Defaults. Kubuntu developers have said that they will not be using Mir. Thus I expect X/Wayland to be available in the repositories and used by default by alternative flavours.
> 2. Unity (Well I am tiled window manager (i3) guy now so all DEs) I really don't like the flow of OS X and it is starting to really look more like OS X. DEFAULT an easily be changed.
Defaults. Alternative Ubuntu flavours provide alternative DE defaults.
> 3. Lack of community between the Linux ecosystem. Millions is spent on Ubuntu but seems like little makes it upstream.
I addressed this separately.
> 4. Software Center. They need to just take OpenSUSE's one-click model and get rid of their current model of App Store and the horrible app model. (My model)
Defaults. You can use whichever front-end to apt you wish; Software Center is just the default. If there's an alternative available in Debian, Ubuntu has it. Examples: Synaptic, gdebi-gtk. Sure, they aren't complete replacements. But if a suitable Free alternative is written, I expect that it will be packaged in Debian and be available in Ubuntu.
> 5. Their Developer SDK to "Write once, run everywhere."
Defaults. You don't have to use their developer SDK (except perhaps for apps that will work on Ubuntu Phone through the default app store; but then other distributions have no answer to that, do they?). Traditional dependency and package -based development is still available and is not going away.
Ubuntu are adding to what was there previously. They are not replacing things, except that they are using their new stuff as the default. Your complaints are about what Ubuntu are doing; except that all the traditional stuff that other distributions have are still available. This is why your arguments still boil down to arguments about defaults.
1. Mir they shouldn't do this. Again Philosophy.
2. Unity they shouldn't follow OS X lead. Again Philosophy.
4. Software Center - It is where you BUY programs and magazines. It is not a default it is how they run the business. Again Philosophy.
5. SDK is another HUGE philosophy issue. This write for Ubuntu is not Linux friendly. Again Philosophy.
What reason would you have to stay with Ubuntu if you don't like any of its defaults? If someone doesn't like Ubuntu's changes to Debian, but still uses Ubuntu, isn't that just fragmentation when there's no need for it?
The set of applications I now use has changed quite a lot recently, and now I find myself reevaluating Ubuntu. And while I gather people didn't like the change over to Unity, I'm appreciating the thoughtful UI choices and find it to be a selling point (it's been a long time since I've needed to do anything like tweak an .fvwmrc file!)
Whether or not Canonical can execute on it, I also like the direction they're going with the convergence stuff in Unity. My phone actually is approaching the level of power that I need in a desktop computer. The ability to dock it and still have Emacs seems pretty powerful. MS and Apple will get there in some form, but I suspect their visions of convergence will be somewhat more restrictive in terms of what I can do.
Whether or not they need Mir for that vision, I've no idea. However, I remember people talking about X11 replacements clear back in the long ago, and being disappointed for years. Canonical seems pretty close to delivering something that they say will enable them to do something that I think will be cool. And, I believe they've said it will be open source. Thus, I really don't get what all the flap about Mir is. If someone wants to prove the viability / superiority of Wayland by building the Ubuntu convergence phone ahead of canonical, more power to them.
Mir isn't even used in 13.10.
I don't think there are any distributions which ship with i3 so you would have to install i3 in any case, that isn't a fault of Ubuntu's and since you are not using it anyway, who cares if it looks like OS X to you?
Ubuntu's work is open source, the code is there under a liberal license, what do you even want?
If you don't like software center, use apt-get or synaptic. Their "App Store" isn't for you but I am glad they have one to encourage a market for Linux software. If you don't like it, don't use it, it's not harming you.
I don't know what developer SDKs have to do with anything. This isn't Android, it's normal Linux. Write a Linux app and it runs on Ubuntu.
Why would I look at OpenSUSE if I do not specifically want an RPM-based distribution oriented toward KDE? If those are your preferences then why are you even complaining about Ubuntu?
Mir isn't even used in 13.10
BUT they are spending resources on Mir WHEN they could have just gone with Wayland.
They can spend resources on what they like. This isn't a zero sum game. This doesn't take other Free software away from you. This doesn't remove other Free software from Ubuntu's repositories.
> they could have just gone with Wayland.
I don't pretend to understand the technical details. But they seem to be the only ones pushing a full traditional distribution onto a phone. They've made it happen.
This is Free software. You go use Wayland on your phone that you don't have and enjoy whatever full traditional Linux distribution that doesn't exist there, and I'll use Mir on the phone I can have today and enjoy a standard Linux distribution on it.
Agree. Not because I necessary dislike Ubuntu, but because openSUSE is awesome. It's insanely flexible (hence the chameleon mascot), fast, YaST is great, one-click installs are great for newbies, openSUSE build service is great, and installing software/new repositories is very easy. Zypper also beats yum and apt-get...
I won't use it on desktop (I'm on gentoo for more than a decade and am very happy with it), but I use it on laptop and tried its mobile version on my nexus7 (ubuntu touch, but that's basically 13.10). It's only when I played with it on tablet that I understood what unity is about.
You compare it to macosx, and I agree, here : it's some kind of responsive interface, allowing to have the same feeling on a desktop, a laptop and a mobile. That's certainly not our usual linux environment, but I'm glad they're trying to innovate, here.
I can't wait to see what will come out of that when it's finished, because even the browser was quite unusable when I tried ubuntu touch (it keeps on clicking 25/50px above were I was tapping).
The qt5 development environment looks promising to write apps, too. Not only that will be nice to write mobile apps, but even to write desktop small apps and widgets. Each time I tried to write some kde javascript plasma widget, it was painful by lack of documentation and lack of debug features. Ubuntu sdk looks great, so far (just sad it's just for ubuntu).
Servers is quite nice with 12.04 though, and that's what they are designed for.
To me, it's a different distro because it only comes with the lightweight choices. (I found it very time-consuming to strip down Ubuntu, compared to tweaking Lubuntu upward).
The only minor criticism I could have is that it's a lot of work to make a Lubuntu theme from scratch, because of the many components to theme.
LXDE has some usability issues (such as random glitches, which seems to be mostly resolved since 13.04) over XFCE or other desktop environments but I find it quite a joy to use, especially as I work on a single monitor but have multiple workspaces which I can tab through using alt+scroll, or using scroll on the wallpaper - for example I have development (sublime/chrome) on workspace 1, emails on workspace 2, testing on workspace 3 (which runs in the background and is handy to run).
LXDE seems to be the only desktop environment that doesn't lag when I have quite a few things open and going off at once, but I need to re-experiment with XFCE now 13.10 has come out to give it a proper go.
I should just post "Ubuntu 14.04 (Taunting Tiger) released" and get my own share of karma...
I therefore created the amd64+mac CD images, which are exactly the same as the amd64 images except that they only support BIOS booting. Macs are happy to boot these in their BIOS emulation mode." [1]
TL;DR There is no difference... Normal CDs just won't boot on Macs.
[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/37999/what-is-different-about...
Wonder which one will get most press coverage :)
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-now-available...
EDIT: I almost decided to switch to Xubuntu, but then I installed xfce, tried it out, and found that they didn't provide that option either. Besides, using xmonad with xfce is much more complicated than with GNOME.
setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
(Of course then I switched to xfce on my laptop, which seems to run its own xmodmap command after its run startup scripts or something which overrides them, which is kinda annoying, haven't found a nice way to get around that).
(Apologies if me saying 'runs at startup' was misleading -- obviously if I had tried to do it from a script that ran on boot, before X starts (rather than on session start) it could never have worked in the first place!).
Edit: now I've started thinking about it again, I've changed the autostart script to call another which sleeps for 10s before xmodmap, which seems to have fixed the problem.
Their what's new page is kinda succinct: https://help.ubuntu.com/13.10/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html
My prediction: LTS will be 14.10 and Mir will be default in 14.04.
I'm really tired of the software world moving forward and Ubuntu turning into Debian Woody.
php 5.5.3. Postres 9.1.10
Ruby isn't listed, but I usually use rvm, rbenv, or something along those lines.
On the plus side, gcc is 4.8.1, which is as up to date as your going to get without installing development builds.
What Linux/Unix distro you use is up to you though and I will not start a debate. I understand that it makes sense in the enterprise field to only use the most popular and stable OS, to benefit from the Community and Support.
However OSX and Linux Mint, Fedora and Sabayon are the most User Friendly Linuces that I know from my experience. And I've tried most of the stuff on DistroWatch and some that aren't even listed on DistroWatch.
No matter how you dislike Windows, it's still a very solid platform to develop Desktop or Web Applications. I am biased, because I don't like Microsoft, but that doesn't allow me to judge on the effectivity of their software. It does the job. The same, or better can be said about Mac OSX, Ubuntu, Sabayon, Arch Linux and Gentoo which are the most developer friendly environments you can get your hands on. Never force your top developer or sysadmin to use another Linux/Unix than he prefers! Really don't do that. It's like giving your Top-Employee an ugly haircut, he'll leave and not come back or loose effectivity.
Now in practice you might say, this is different and people have their tastes. Totally right and they have their right to like what they want!! But I introduced an entire development team consisting of about 20 people to Mac OSX and Ubuntu. They had the choice to choose their favorite development environment, but 50% of them switched to Ubuntu, 30% switched to Mac OSX and 20% stayed with Windows. The latter stayed with Windows, because it was too much hassle for them to port all projects and settings over. Even the most fanatic Windows user tried Ubuntu Linux out and was totally blown away after a week of trial.
This helped us to standardize development standards and deploy Ubuntu images to new employees so that they don't have to manually set things up, but can start working after only a few minutes of waiting.
At the time I arrived at the company, I had to use Windows although I requested using my favorite Linux distro. They simply had "no time", to allow me setting the machine up. The result: The Windows box I got was very instable and their ancient svn architecture (without development branch!! All changes were live and they had 500+ customers) continuously helped to crash the buggy Eclipse installation they gave me (weren't allowed to fix it myself).
That made the impression that I work slow, so the Boss sat next to me and stress-tested my ability to live-code what he braindumps into production within 10min while looking over my shoulder. They still use my work and yes, I could finally convert them partly to Git after some months. However I was moved to management and a slow OSX box. Don't get a wrong impression, I had to now work on many APIs, many Back-Ends and integrate our software. And additionally hang on the phone/headset talking with tech or ceo/sales while doing that. So after dealing with their customers and organizing things, I couldn't but quit the job. It was boring and I didn't learn new things, but were forced to use the slow or buggy machine even though I noticeably made things more effective internally. They basically used me as much as they were able to, making empty promises all way long. And to be honest, they weren't even able to do that correctly, they could've used me to do much more, but wanted me to focus only on core-value problems. Corporate culture in a Startup, I hate it! That's my experience, your mileage may vary.
I finally stopped due to my laptop itself breaking; crunchbang is my new distro of choice for my desktop. Biggest upsides: fast(er) turnaround time on updating packages compared to Gentoo (not just build time, entropy >> portage as a package management system). Current packages packages with wide selection due to Gentoo as upstream. The one caveat is that mixing gentoo/sabayon with any amount of complexity is pretty involved.
php 5.5.3+dfsg-1ubuntu2
postgres 9.3+146really9.1+148
ruby 1:1.9.3
I agree they should really have postgres 9.2 in Saucy, so it would be very stable by 14.04.
Now, the postgres issue is bit different, but Juju solves this problem flawlessly. Check this out: https://github.com/charms/postgresql
What I do these days is setup a VM (vagrant, maybe), depending on what I'm doing, setup RVM, NVM or virtualenv. Juju deploy locally the services I need (mongo, postgres, redis, memcache etc). Done and done.
http://releases.ubuntu.com/13.10/
MD5 CheckSums:
Frustrating how they can break such an important thing (keyboards)
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