Release status update (or, Hoary and you)

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 02:13:21PM +1100, Nick Loeve wrote:

> As an aside... could the people responsible for the Hoary Goals please 
> review the Hoary Release Notes, and let me know if there are items that 
> should have more of a blurb, are not going to be included in Hoary, or 
> if i am missing contributors.
> 
> A HTML preview is available at 
> http://people.ubuntu.com/~mako/docteam/release-notes/ReleaseNotes.html
> 
> When you all have a chance that is :)

Thanks, this looks great.  A few points of note:

- We should refer to the release consistently as "Ubuntu 5.04" or "Ubuntu
  5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog)"

- CCing Daniel Stone for a summary of what improvements are manifest in
  Hoary's X.org compared to Warty's XFree86

- We should consider adding some screenshots of some of the new
  functionality (update-{notifier,manager}, gnome-app-install, laptop
  suspend, etc.)

- Readahead speeds up the boot process by loading information
  from disk into memory before it is needed, taking advantage of the
  predictable nature of the boot sequence

- hotplug also handles detection of non-removable devices, such as PCI
  cards, and so the most significant speedup applies to the boot process
  (where hotplug is used to load drivers for all recognized hardware in the
  system)

- The support for processor frequency scaling is an incremental improvement
  on the existing support in Ubuntu 4.10, providing for automatic driver
  support for a wider variety of hardware

- The key feature of the hardware database is that it allows the Ubuntu
  community to contribute information which will assist the development team
  in improving Ubuntu's support for their hardware

- CCing Colin for a detailed description of the Kickstart functionality

- An important aspect of the hardware detection unification is that if the
  live CD configures itself correctly for the user's hardware, the
  installation CD will as well.  This makes the live CD more useful as a
  means to establish hardware compatibility, and as a low-risk means to test
  whether hardware detection bugs have been fixed in a later version.

- The paragraph on the keyboard layout selector should mention that the new
  method interactively helps the user determine their layout through a
  simple process of pressing keys on their keyboard

- The DVD install images are significant because they provide all supported
  software, including many packages which are not installed by default.
  It is also intended that the DVD image will be a combination live+install
  disc, though this work is not yet complete.

- Regarding the questions asked by the installer in the first stage, this is
  significant because it allows the entire second stage of the installation
  to be non-interactive.  Once the CD is removed and the system is rebooted,
  the remainder of the installation continues unattended.

- Language packs also will save disk space as applications become translated
  into more languages, and allow translations to be updated (both new and
  existing languages) by modifying only a single package.  They also allow
  Ubuntu to directly import translations from Rosetta.

- We should explain briefly what UTF-8 is and why it is the right thing to
  do

- Let's remove the bit about inotify, since it is quite likely that we will
  be disabling it per default in Hoary due to stability issues

- amd64 was already fully supported in Ubuntu 4.10; CCing Tollef for details
  on the improved 32-bit compatibility feature

-- 
 - mdz