request for review of Ubuntu 9.04 RC announcement

[David Mandala]

Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:13:49PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
>> So part of the premise for the releases.u.c/cdimage.u.c split is that the
>> high-profile, heavy-traffic images are published to releases, where they get
>> widely mirrored; and the less-downloaded images, constituting a larger set,
>> are published to cdimage.  Pointing at cdimage.u.c from the announcement
>> seems to run counter to this, and will probably draw far more traffic than
>> cdimage is prepared to handle.  Linking it from
>> <http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.04/> would have less impact, but I fear it
>> would still cripple the server.
>>
>> I'm waiting for feedback from James to make sure we have room, but I expect
>> we'll publish UNR from releases.u.c instead for the RC, in which case
>> there's no need to link to cdimage for it.  Accomodating armel is more
>> likely to be a problem, but I'd like to try to squeeze it in as well.
> 
> If space is the issue, what about replacing one of the less-downloaded
> images on releases?  I expect UNR to be more popular than, say, kubuntu
> alternate amd64.
> 
> I realize it's late in the day to be making such a change, though.
> 
>> The question is, which armel images are to be published?  Are we supporting
>> both desktop and alternate images for armel?  Desktop only?  Prior to beta
>> there had been no mention at all of images for ARM aside from netboot, and
>> at beta we had only a single "custom" desktop disk image available, so I'm
>> not sure what the intent is here.  The fewer images we care about
>> publishing, of course, the easier it will be to accomodate them on
>> releases.ubuntu.com.  But I need to know fairly quickly which images we want
>> to highlight, so I can get them prepublished to the mirrors in preparation
>> for the RC.  That probably also affects what we say about ARM in the
>> announcement.
> 
> It should be desktop only (no alternate), and there is no need to try to fit
> it on releases (cdimage is most appropriate).

If more then 50 non-canonical people download the ARM image I will be
shocked.  There is VERY little hardware currently available to anyone
anywhere, I think a total of 100 units were made, and we have 30 of them
and some of those have failed so this limits who will download images.

> 
>> Assuming for the moment that we're only highlighting the desktop image for
>> ARM, I've added the following text to the draft under 'desktop features'.
>> This is really very rough, and I would appreciate some help refining it;
>> I'm afraid I just don't know what the immediate use cases for the ARM port
>> are expected to be, so don't know what we should be emphasizing here.
>>
>>   ARM support:  this release of Ubuntu integrates support for the ARM
>>   architecture, bringing the same high-quality desktop to an even wider
>>   range of energy-efficient systems.

Yes this is the target for ARM, Matt hit the target on the head, I could
not say it better.

> 
> The key points, I think are:
> 
>  * Aimed at developers (there aren't actually any laptop form factor devices
>    to run this on yet)

This is correct, it's targeted at developers, as I mentioned above,
there is VERY limited hardware available (almost none), no devices
beyond the Babbage boards, no netbooks, laptops, etc yet.  I been told
this will change over the next 3-4 months when development hardware will
become generally available, and I would expect netbook type hardware
shortly after that say 5-7 months.


> 
>  * Community supported
> 
>  * List of reference boards which work (I think the Freescale Babbage board
>    is the only one on that list at the moment)

The only board it's known to work on is the Freescale Babbage boards.
It was developed and tested on them.

> 
>  * Installation is complex and not for the faint of heart (there's a wiki
>    page for this)

Yes, while the image is a live image, the hardware itself is "different"
which makes the installation "interesting" more like a boot floppy with
root filesystem on a HD, then a true HD install.  This is a limitation
of the hardware.  The next version of the hardware is expected to change
this but for now, this is what we have to live with.

> 
> David is the authority on this, but maybe this will provide a head start
> until he's awake.
> 

I'm happy to discuss this at further length.  But I hope this helps.

-- 
David Mandala <davidm at canonical dot com>
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