Ubuntu 'Feisty Fawn' released, hit by traffic

Canonical on Thursday released version 7.04 of Ubuntu Linux, nicknamed Feisty Fawn, but the company's Web site was unable to keep up with the demand for the software.

The up-and-coming Ubuntu has yet to attain the commercially blessed status of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise, which have been in the marketplace years longer and are certified to work with many software and hardware products. But Canonical's software has built a significant fan base with its twice-yearly updates, user-friendly values and cutesy naming scheme.

Feisty Fawn held up better than the protagonist in the animation Bambi Meets Godzilla: Canonical put up a bare-bones home page with just a single logo and a list of "mirror" sites from which the software can be downloaded. Still, the site was unavailable for more than half of the day, according to site availability monitoring company Pingdom.

"We have been absolutely swamped with hits to the Web site and the mirrors," Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth said in a conference call. "Fortunately there are 160 mirrors out there, all rapidly updating to include Feisty Fawn. We hope the logjam won't last much longer."

Feisty Fawn features virtualization support and a new crash-reporting tool to aid debugging, but not the glitzy 3D interface Shuttleworth initially wanted.

Ubuntu got an unsolicited endorsement from Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell, a computer maker that's been wrestling with how to meet demand for desktop Linux. On Wednesday, the company announced on its Direct2Dell blog that Michael Dell got a new notebook with Feisty Fawn installed.

Shuttleworth said he didn't talk to Dell's CEO about the move and wouldn't comment on whether he was in discussions with the computer maker for some sort of partnership. But Dell's move "does suggest that the company is forward-looking and perhaps considering Ubuntu," Shuttleworth said.

Ubuntu is chiefly popular on PCs today, but Canonical is following the well-worn path to the server as it builds its Linux business. On servers, the open-source operating system is a stronger rival to Microsoft Windows and functionally very similar to versions of Unix that many administrators are familiar with. Red Hat and Novell's Linux business comes chiefly from selling support subscriptions to server customers.

Also on Thursday, Canonical announced a partnership with Sun Microsystems to bolster its server push. The company has integrated Sun's Java software with Feisty Fawn, making it available through the "multiverse" collection of preconfigured, downloadable software packages.

Sun has begun making its core Java Standard Edition software open source and will finish during the first half of 2007, said Jeet Kaul, Sun's vice president of developer products and programs. Other components already are open-source software, including the Glassfish project for Java Enterprise Edition, a collection of extensions for running Java on servers, and NetBeans, a Java programming environment.

Java SE, Glassfish and NetBeans all are available for Feisty Fawn, Shuttleworth said.

"This is the first time the Java platform technology has been fully integrated into a Linux distribution to this extent," said Ian Murdock, Sun's newly appointed chief operating systems officer and founder of the Debian version of Linux on which Ubuntu is based.

Though NetBeans is his own "preferred Java development environment," Shuttleworth said that its main rival, Eclipse, already is integrated into Ubuntu.

The next version of Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon, is due in October. Neither it nor Feisty Fawn features the long-term support of version 6.06, called Dapper Drake. A version with long-term support, which lasts five years, likely won't arrive until the release of Gutsy Gibbon's successor, Shuttleworth said.

[Razzl]

Free! Did we mention it was free?

"The up-and-coming Ubuntu has yet to attain the commercially blessed status of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise"

Well, it's free! It's hard to get "commercially-blessed status" when nobody's selling it to you. Did I already say it's free?!? You just go and download it a use your money for something else you want--THAT kind of free...

[FOSS4evR]

Re: Free!

Just so I'm clear on this one point. It is free, right?

[Eggs Ackley]

But how much does it cost?

I mean what do I have to pay for it?

[cary1]

And it is worth every penny!

...

[cary1]

And it is worth every penny!

amen

[ColdMast]

FREE as in BEER

FREE as in BEER
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre#Gratis" target="_newWindow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre#Gratis</a>

support cost $ for Ubuntu.
but the OS is free: as in beer.

---
Lets face it: Vista is slow, but more stable than Windows 95.

but once your brainwashed by Micro$oft Evangelism:
"Vista is Beatiful"
"most secure windows ever"
"WOW alt-tab does a temporary 3D cascade"


cascades, just like you used to get in windows 3.1

[thomasnruth]

Its Free? Absolutely.

Ubuntu is indeed "free" in its truest sense -- free to obtain and free to do with what ever you want: decompile it, reconstruct it, change it, alter its source code, and virtaully any other constructive/destructive mode. It's not only "free" to obtain and download, its TRUELY free.

[m7sang7]

Begin of the end

Remember this date , It can be the begin of the end
of MS's control of desktop pc.(and ...yes I know more of 1000 millions MS user)

[Solaris_User]

Vista killer.

Ubuntu is easier to use than Windows. No hunting around the web for drivers. No spyware, no anoying "help", Just a clean work space to get stuff done.

With this I can load up my podcasts and sync then to my ipod. I can play any video under the sun with mplayer. Firefox is a amazing web browser and all the plugins work very well now. I can load up wine and play World of Warcraft for hours or play other games with my PS2 Dual Shock controler that just works, I can take video with my webcam AND edit it then post it to YouTube if I like. If I want to check my mail Evolution rocks Outlooks socks and with Bobofilter and Spamassassin the spam filters are great. Finally if I'm on the go I can use my cell phone as a modem with the wireless bluetooth support.

Linux is "Desktop Ready" and has been for a long time now.

[milrtime]

Re: Vista killer.

A lot of that could be said about macs as well.

Also, what about stuff that doesn't "just work?" Not necessarily Ubuntu's fault, but some hardware just isn't supported by its manufacturers on linux and doesn't work quite like it should.

That being said, I can't wait to try out the new version and see if some of my current problems are fixable.

[ferretboy88]

I would not go that far.

When Ubuntu works on every computer(and Laptop) then it will be
able compete. I really love my vista pc and my mac and my ubuntu
pc but Unbuntu is very picky about which computers it likes. I have
7 computers and only 2 really work with 6.10. And only 1 other
likes 6.06. It should work on every computer. How would a
windows switcher know how to fix this.

[dotmike]

Vista killing itself, Feisty steps over the carcass!

The only people I know who *lurv* Vista are MSDN types.
Outside the chorus of MVPs who chant "Vista is so beautiful I
want to marry it," the response amongst the general IT public is
depressingly ho hum. (Depressing for those of us who want to
see .NET 3.0 pushed forward.)

And understandably so. The DRM issues are deep and
frustrating. There is the whole "everything that isn't Ultimate is
treated like a second class citizen because we need to bump up
the revenues to grant some more employee
bonuses." (Microsoft doesn't use stock option backdating, it
uses high margin software packaging.)

The security warnings are obnoxious, and almost seem
calculated to intrude in the worst way. Even many MVPs I've
spoken to admit it could have been done much better.

Compatibility issues and driver problems raise their ugly head
far too often.

It's understandable why many people come to the conclusion
that it's better to stay with the devil you know, hence Dell and
HP continuing to offer XP, an OS dating from 2001. And with
sensible people just sticking with the PC they've got.

And even those who do brave the new Vista challenges still have
to contend with all the Windows problems of viruses, spyware,
and botnet harvesting. They're not going away while Microsoft
owns the market.

Against this, Feisty comes charging in, a modern OS with a
powerful heritage. It's a pretty darn compelling idea to run it as
the base OS, and just "VMWare" Windows as a process that can
be killed (Unix term!) when it runs amok.

[thedreaming]

Not Yet

Thanks to ubuntu, linux is getting very close to being desktop ready, but it's not quite there yet.

As an example, look at my current situation. Previous versions of ubuntu ran beautifully on my old laptop and loaded a driver for my wireless card automatically.

With the current version of ubuntu, my wireless card doesn't work, it never loaded a driver for it. Also, it doesn't shutdown correctly. It sorta hangs.

I'm sure this problem can be fixed with a little looking around in the support forums, but I never needed to before with older versions.

Desktop ready? Not yet, but it's close.

[jeolmeun]

Firefox 2.0 upgrade easy, yet?

Last time I tried Ubuntu, updating the Firefox 1.5 that came with it wasn't easy. I had to search to find out how to update Firefox. Ubuntu seems organized in updating packages and dependencies, but for some reason didn't have an organized easy way to update the browser.

[dhtechs]

Firefox 2.0 Upgrade

Ever try Automatix2? Installs loads of current and cutting edge aps, codecs and supports Swiftfox 2.0

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.getautomatix.com/" target="_newWindow">http://www.getautomatix.com/</a>

[MSSlayer]

I hope this is better then Edgy or Dapper

I think Ubuntu has promise, but in no way can it compete with SuSE, yet.

[MSSlayer]

Nope

Slightly, and I mean slightly better hardware support and that is it.

Same retarded install.

Same buggy package manager

same sluggish performance

same old crap.

It is still years behind, RHEL, SuSE, openSuSE and Fedora.

[ben::zen]

Get them hooked on linux...

and then you can complain about the differences. Once they like it, they can try different installs, right? Also, we should try to reintroduce the terminal. These days, people are afraid of the blinking prompt... it's not that hard! Also, we don't need vitriol right now, with a new, more desktop-ready linux distro than ever before. I've looked at openSuSE... it wouldn't start GNOME on my system! let's leave it at that, shall we?

[thomasnruth]

Microsoft Windows Has Cancer

Within hours of its release, Feisty Fawn was on my desktop and Singing In The Rain over Microsoft's dark cloud -- Ubuntu (sorry Microsoft, but the Open Source community will be a long-term thorn in your side.) Ubuntu has become a growing cancer to Windows, slowly putting it to death, eating away at desktop OS loyalty. Developers are increasingly moving away from the restrictive access of Microsoft to join the Open Source community.

With my first install of Ubuntu I for one will never return to the headache of Windows and its billion security patches. I have a dual-boot desktop with Debian on one drive and XP Pro on the other. Since the upgrade to Feisty Fawn, I haven't looked upon the face my Microsoft Windows desktop.

In July my company plans on releasing a classroom training course, free to the community -- Introduction to Linux. Our goal: distribute the Ubuntu OS and educate users with hands on experience. The course will be led by volunteer PC technicians on nights and weekends to anyone who wishes to participate. We currently have a waiting list with more than 300 Window's loyalists negotiating their transition away from Microsoft products. Our company also plans on intigrating a phase-out program to discontinue support to customers with Windows-based desktops.

With that said, I believe Microsoft is facing a slow death with its Windows OS and their lack of customer support (in addition to its "Validate-this" and "Validate-that" slap in the face).

Good by Windows!

[johnericanderson]

Spell Checker Doesn't Work

Obviously the *nix spell checker doesn't work.

"plans on intigrating a phase-out"

You get what you pay for. Free.