[ubuntu-uk] 11.04 Natty Narwhal

Sean Miller sean at seanmiller.net
Wed Aug 18 10:32:55 BST 2010


On 18 August 2010 10:08, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> Compare that to "6.06 LTS" I know just from that the release date
> (June 2006) and as it's an LTS release it was supported until 2009 (3
> years) on the desktop and 2011 (5 years) on the server. You can't get
> that information from "Dapper Drake" without looking it up.

I have to agree with you on that one: it is at least self-explanatory,
but I think one of the issues with Ubuntu is actually telling what is
"a release" and what is a "patch"... some of the version upgrades just
feel like installing "XP SP2" whereas others are like moving from XP
to Vista, or Vista to '7'... and the version numbers tell us nothing
about that at all.

Let me put it a slightly different way... if you were au fait with XP
but not with Windows 98 and you were asked for support with a 98
installation you may try to do something useful, but you'd know that
it "wasn't an OS I really know"... if somebody says to me "I have
Ubuntu" I'll try to help them with their issues, but I have to admit
that I know that fixes that might work in (say) Lucid or Karmic may
well be completely irrelevant to Dapper Drake... and we can presumably
assume that if they are still running Warty they're pretty much "on
their own"??

I'd like more of an indication on version numbers of "what branch of
Ubuntu" we're talking about... perhaps this is impossible with an OS,
perhaps it is not... but whilst I recognise that the 9.04 tells me
something about how long official support lasts it doesn't actually
tell me anything about whether it is more similar to the LTS release
before it or the one after and whether any advice I could give would
be relevant or not...

Sean



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