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Desktop Porn
Wed Feb 17Propaganda
Small print in big fat letters
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
Apr
20
I’ve been running the development version of Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) on all my machines since GNOME 2.14 was released on March 15th, without too much trouble. When I ran my daily upgrade yesterday, I noticed the artwork started to mention Dapper Beta. Today, Dapper officially enters Beta status, so the release should be more or less in its final form. Now you can read the Beta Announcement and drool over the great new features. If you can, try out the Beta and report any remainging bugs!
Dapper is different from previous Ubuntu releases. It is the culmination of lessons learned from the first three releases and will be the first one to receive three years of support for desktop installations and five years for servers, which makes it comparable to the expensive “enterprise” distributions from Red Hat and SUSE. The difference is of course that Ubuntu will never have a separate “enterprise” release but all Ubuntu users get the best possible distribution for free. This is great for corporate users and others who value extremely stable platforms but it has another consequense as well, for those who enjoy living on the edge: the freedom to experiment on the release coming up after Dapper, the Edgy Eft!
Following a rock solid release such as Dapper, the Ubuntu community can again freely concentrate on exploring new, exciting technologies for the next releases. Ubuntu leader Mark Shuttleworth, A.K.A sabdfl, opened yesterday the planning period for the next release, giving the community free hands to experiment, imposing almost “zero from-the-top requirements” for the release. We can afford this because of the long support for Dapper. Those who want to keep running a solid release can still enjoy Dapper while the more adventurous users can venture to the unknown with Edgy Eft. I’m sure that will be very exciting. I’m already anxious to try out Xen, wobbly windows on Xgl/AIGXL, and whatever the Ubuntu hackers come up with. Let’s first get Dapper out though, and make sure it’s the most awesome system to date!