[digital:meditation]

“All operating systems include stuff you’ll never use. For example, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS includes an easy uninstall feature.
We know – completely redundant. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for desktops – you’ll never go back.”

8.04 “Hardy Heron”, the latest version of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has been released this week, in short sequence as a server version (supported to 2013) and a desktop distribution (supported to 2011), being the Long Term Support version to follow 6.06 “Dapper Drake” which (at least in our professional infrastructure) has proven to be an incredibly stable and maintaineable platform suiting all our needs. And, looking at it closely, it is obvious that 8.04 has seen an amazing load of work compared to its predecessors, seen both in overall stability, performance as well as in “small” details like the customized Firefox starting page or, as quoted above, a pretty cool marketing / product launch campaign which feels in a refreshing way ironic compared to what other companies tend to do getting their new releases out. Along with Ubuntu itself, there also are new releases of Kubuntu (offered as a “stable” version that comes with KDE 3.5 as well as a “bleeding-edge” version including the infamous new KDE 4), the education / classroom distribution Edubuntu and, of course, my personal favorite Xubuntu, including the lightweight XFCE desktop environment, and being great despite the fact that the default backgrounds in GDM and on the desktop itself just painfully suck. ;) Overally, I have been with Xubuntu 8.04 already for quite a few months, and the last few weeks it has turned out to be a stable and pretty usable machine ready for everyday use, addressing a few issues I had to manually deal with in earlier versions (like using the dual-screen setup on my notebook).

Asides this, however, I am whole-heartedly amazed to see Ubuntu turning into something I haven’t seen that often in GNU/Linux community the last twelve years: It seems to be a distribution which gets more and more approved by both community and companies / commercial providers. Maybe the “open” nature of Ubuntu and the fact that there are predictable, long-term supported releases is something that pays off in the end to help this distribution gaining acceptance all around, becoming a “real” all-purpose (including desktop usage) distribution without throwing away most if not all of the GNU ideas.

And, another thing notable to me, being a Java developer: Ubuntu 8.04 seems the first GNU/Linux distribution so far that includes a fully-fledged set of tools in its package repository:


[kr@n428 9:13:11] ~> apt-cache policy openjdk-6-jdk sun-java6-jdk glassfishv2 netbeans
openjdk-6-jdk:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6b09-0ubuntu2
Versions-Tabelle:
6b09-0ubuntu2 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages
sun-java6-jdk:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6-06-0ubuntu1
Versions-Tabelle:
6-06-0ubuntu1 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
glassfishv2:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:2.0.1-0ubuntu5
Versions-Tabelle:
2.0.1-0ubuntu5 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
netbeans:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6.0.1-0ubuntu2
Versions-Tabelle:
6.0.1-0ubuntu2 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages

So, we do have both OpenJDK and Sun’s “regular” Java SDK in its recent versions, along with the current version of the open-source Glassfish application server (V2u1, at least until Monday, April 28, it seems…), and the recent stable version of the NetBeans IDE, so far my favorite Java/all-purpose development environment. Honestly, installing any of these applications using the “vanilla” installer without relying upon apt and the package repository ain’t that much more difficult, but at least this way getting started doing serious work in Ubuntu 8.04 is easier than ever before, and, considering the idea that Glassfish on Ubuntu 8.04 even might become a configuration officially supportable by Sun, this also might grow the acceptance of Hardy Heron as a server distribution compared to, say, RedHat or SuSE Enterprise Linux. Now I (a) wonder whether the packaging folks will be up to keep packages current when, in example, NetBeans 6.1 is about to be released soon, and (b) whether, talking especially about the Java and integration thing, Sun and the OpenSolaris folks are likely to get (Open)Solaris distributions on par with Ubuntu also in terms of desktop usage and package installation / update procedure, or whether Solaris is rather left for the server usage while Sun folks do focus on supporting Ubuntu as main desktop system environment. Let’s see what will happen…

Things are moving on quickly: Release Candidate 1 of what is likely to be the NetBeans 6.1 IDE is available right now. Get it here, and get started immediately. Not much else to say about it, I guess: Performance has somewhat improved, Spring support really has given quite a boost to my productivity using NetBeans lately, and there is a bunch of minor annoyances that has been removed or fixed. In my daily work, I excessively rely upon Spring, maven2 and database tooling as well as XML editing tools, and, as far as these are concerned, NetBeans 6.1 also in pre-RC has been a stable, very convenient tool to be used in everyday work – I actually have already seen final releases of applications to be less stable than that. So, good job so far. However, there is one update I dearly hope it will make its way into 6.1: The 3.1 version of NetBeans Maven Tooling finally offers support for browsing remote repositories. Definitely desirable.

Hard to say that Flickr folks are living an easy life these days… Goin’ through the somewhat rough days of censorship issues in mid-2007, to quite some of its community Flickr seems to massively have lost its reputation being a community-driven, community-focused platform but just rather another small company giving in sell-out way too quickly. Well, fair or not, things hardly could be worse than they are now, now that possibly even the last one “on-line” has discovered about Microsoft trying hard to buy Yahoo!, then and now unfortunate home of Flickr. And then? What is to happen? Not much, I suppose. Even goin’ through these days of attacking censorship on Flickr, losing a bunch of active users obviously didn’t make them bother that much. Possibly they aren’t likely to care losing a few thousands more in course of something they are hardly to change anyhow, in course of something possibly to bring them hundreds of thousands of new customers possibly living off the benefits of having a “MS Flickr” experience seamlessly integrated with whichever piece of Windows-only software they could come up with. But it’s not just the end of Yahoo! (oh well…), but it’s also the definite end of Flickr, ending up being just another mainstream image-dumping platform stripped of all the “community” it used to be some day, somehow. And, given that obviously Yahoo being bought by MS is just a matter of more money being offered, days of Flickr surely are counted…