Ubuntu 6.10 hangs on install

[Liam Proven]

On 22/06/07, Pete Holsberg <pjh42 at pobox.com> wrote:

> What do gusty, feisty and edgy have that 6.06 does not? IOW, who
> "upgrades" and for what reasons?

That is a question with a /huge/ answer.

This is FOSS. It's not a commercial package, updated every few years
with a shiny box listing the new features. There are few formal
"release cycles" for FOSS. Code undergoes continual review and
improvement. "Release early, release often" is the mantra.

Every release of Ubuntu, every 6 months, is substantially changed.
Pretty much every single program file in every repository will have
changed, generally for the better. Bugs are removed, features are
added, crufty bits are optimised, UI glitches are smoothed over.

Feisty has 3D desktop effects onboard. It has management of restricted
binary drivers integrated. It has automatic detection and loading of
proprietary media components.

In the last year or 18mth, Ubuntu has gained a simplified "Add/remove
programs" GUI for applications management, as well as Synaptic for
experts. It's gained major new releases of its flagship apps, Firefox,
GAIM, OpenOffice and so on. It's gained several small admin tools for
setting up and monitoring things like wired and wireless network cards
and connections thereupon. It's made big strides in customisability.

It's changed a lot. If you want detailed changelogs, look at the
release notes for each version.

But stop thinking like a buyer of commercial software packages. Don't
look for "new in version 4!" announcements. FOSS isn't like that. It's
a process of gradual /continual/ change, almost always improvements
and refinements. Sometimes, alas, support for older devices
disappears: stuff from the age of ISA and even 16-bit PCMCIA is
declining, for example. But Ubuntu is a modern OS for modern
computers. It will run on a PIII from 5 years ago, but not very
quickly or smoothly.

Learn to keep your stuff separated out from the OS' stuff. Keep your
files in your home directory and nowhere else; keep the /home tree on
a separate filesystem from your OS, maybe even a separate drive. For
an easier, pain-free life, get used to regularly - say once or twice a
year - nuking your OS and reinstalling from scratch. It's generally
less painful than upgrading then trying to fix all the things that
have broken and it leads to a lot less accumulation of cruft.

A version of Windows from 7y ago is still perfectly usable if,
post-install, you're prepared to spend a full day installing updates,
patches and new apps. I advocate Windows 2000 for older desktop PCs:
it has vastly less cruft and useless tat in it than XP, so is faster,
and it's orders of magnitude smaller and efficient than Vista. Windows
is Windows: so long as you're in the same family (in this case, 32-bit
NT with PnP), they're largely functionally equivalent.

But FOSS ages faster, because it changes quicker. A copy of Linux from
2y ago is vintage software; from 4y ago, it's an antique, completely
superseded by its descendants. That's why there are projects like
Ubuntu Lite and RULE, to develop lightweight modern versions of Linux
for older computers. You don't want to run the old stuff; it is,
relatively speaking, riddled with bugs and gotchas and glitches and
poor hardware support and security vulnerabilities and poorly
optimised with lousy installation tools.

This isn't a world of new boxed products every now and then. It's a
world of new releases every single hour of every single day. A
distribution version, like, say, Ubuntu 6.10, is a snapshot of the
world as it was 9 months ago. And 9 months is 3/4 of a year: it's a
long time, long enough to make a human.

Unless you /need/ to maintain standard versions, say on
mission-critical business systems, when you want stable, solid,
slow-changing releases (like 6.06LTS or Redhat or SUSE's Enterprise
Linuxes), you really should avoid outdated releases of FOSS.

-- 
Liam Proven • Blog, homepage &c: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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