Dell Shows Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Some Love
As Canonical prepares to launch Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) in April 2010, there are signs Dell will show considerable love to the Long Term Support (LTS) release. Here are some preliminary details about Dell’s look at Ubuntu 10.04.
According to Dell’s Direct2Dell web site:
Dell Linux Engineers will hit the road to Dallas, TX to participate in the upcoming Ubuntu Developers Summit for Lucid Lynx (UDS-L).
That event, scheduled for November 16 – 20, is a “forum where the Ubuntu Linux Community Developers and System Integrators (like Dell) come together to discuss and hash out the feature roadmap for the next release of Ubuntu Linux.”
No doubt, Dell’s U.S. team took a few lumps in mid-2009 because the company briefly stopped shipping desktop PCs with Ubuntu — due to Dell’s own internal hardware transition schedules. But there are multiple signs of progress between Dell and Canonical:
- Dell and Canonical in mid-September 2009 introduced Ubuntu Moblin Remix Developer Edition on Dell netbooks.
- Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth visited Dell’s Austin, Texas headquarters in late September 2009.
- Dell’s U.S. website in October 2009 finally re-introduced a desktop PC with Ubuntu preinstalled.
Next up, Dell is closely studying Ubuntu 10.04, an LTS release that Canonical will support for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.
So far, Dell has shown little interest in Ubuntu servers and has focused mainly on Ubuntu notebooks and netbooks. But I’ll be curious to get an update from Dell following the Ubuntu Developers Summit.
No doubt, some skeptics continue to criticize Dell for failing to offer Ubuntu in a range of countries. Also, some critics complain about Dell failing to pre-load the latest Ubuntu releases.
But where others see setbacks, I see tremendous potential. Dell took a chance on Canonical in mid-2007 with its first Ubuntu preloads. Anecdotal evidence suggests Dell is focusing more and more of its time on Ubuntu — including focusing quite a bit on this week’s Ubuntu Developer’s Summit in Dallas.
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I always run the latest Kubuntu, but I see in the forums lots of folks who seem to prefer not to ever have a large-scale upgrade. Which is what they do with Windows, it comes pre-installed and it stay there until the machine dies.
I think Canonical could try to implement a “rolling release” sort to speak with OEM’s: give a base install based on a LTS, and then keep the main apps backported, up to date (say, skype, firefox, etc.) I think that makes a lot of sense. Most “regular” user want the OS pre-installed, and not risk of having to fsck around after a failed upgrade.
Long story short, I think its very reasonable for Dell to focus on 10.04, and try this rolling release concept in their repo’s. Hopefully, this will produce a little bit of revenue for Canonical.
[...] http://www.workswithu.com/2009/11/17/dell-shows-ubuntu-1004-lucid-lynx-some-love/ a few seconds ago from web [...]
I am currently running a Dell Server on a site with Karmic. On the Dell CDs there were only rpm packages for their add-on-tools. A first step could be to produce deb packages…
I agree with Leo! Canonical should definitely implement a “rolling release”. I’ve also noticed that many people are staying with older version of Ubuntu, such as 8.04, just because they know it’s “officially” stable (being a LTS release and all that).
But there’s another issue… and it’s very real: new kernels don’t always support some old components… and various users might get a broken system after an upgrade. Maybe if they will keep older kernels/drivers/firmware (like on the Nvidia graphics cards)…
@Marius: more often the problem is newer hardware not supported by older kernels. This is very different in the Windows world, where your new hardware comes with “drivers in a cd” or something.
For that reason, for Canonical to propose a rolling release in the abstract is a bit of problem to some extent. The kernel you most likely will _not_ update, same goes to XServer, etc.
I think it makes much more sense to do it for OEM’s, and only distribute it through the OEM software channels, validated for their hardware.
Example: I buy a Dell mini. It works now, and I know I will always get latest Skype, latest Firefox, etc., for my base OS, from the Dell repository. If I decide to do a major upgrade, well, that’s my call, but the usual channel will refresh the main applications (OpenOffice also comes to mind).
Cheers!
[...] there are signs Dell will show considerable love to the Long Term Support (LTS) release. Here are some preliminary details about Dell’s look at Ubuntu [...]
[...] Dell Shows Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Some Love So far, Dell has shown little interest in Ubuntu servers and has focused mainly on Ubuntu notebooks and netbooks. But I’ll be curious to get an update from Dell following the Ubuntu Developers Summit. [...]
“… due to Dell’s own internal hardware transition schedules.” That’s quite an odd excuse. Dell doesn’t stop selling Windows PCs entirely purely because of a hardware refresh.
If the hardware refresh is the reason then either Ubuntu just wasn’t a big enough priority to ensure that hardware refresh didn’t effect the quality service to customers or somebody at Dell really needs to work on their forward planing skills.
@Leo: Canonical releases kernel updates all the time. They’re mostly security updates. But it does happen regularly. The Linux driver model also doesn’t get in the way of a rolling release.
Updating the kernel isn’t a problem. It’s just another binary file. For the change to take effect the user simply reboots the PC. Kernel updates are one of the few times where Linux users need to reboot after an update.
It’s also possible to use drivers that exist out-side the kernel. Rather than being compiled into the kernel they simply link to the kernel.
There is however one very important reason not to use the rolling release model. Maintainability. The code fixes and changes and updates become messy and unwieldy for the developers to handle. Every now and then they need to do a clearance and consolidate the changes. Which is basically what new versions of a Linux distribution are.
Then we have feature creep. With a rolling release it becomes very easy to overlook feature creep. Before you know it your OS is bogged down with stuff you just don’t need any longer because better methods have been implemented. Planned roll outs help avoid this because they give developers an opportunity to focus on specific goals and clearly defined objectives.
[...] Read the rest [...]
I find the idea of a rolling LTS very intriguing, and wrote about these very comments here: http://insidesocal.com/click/2009/11/workswithu-dell-cozies-up-to-u.html
[...] Full post here! [...]
I think a rolling LTS that has updated userland applications is a very good idea. I have converted several people (my mom with a mini 10v n-series, my gf’s pc, my gf’s mom’s pc, my 1420n, and my desktop pc), all of which run 8.04. All of these pcs are setup and running just fine. I’d love to be able to put the latest firefox on using official repos, but I don’t want all the hassles that come with a full distro upgrade. I have another PC I use to play around with all the new distros, but for the PCs that I use daily, I have the LTS. It’s served me well for a year and a half, and I don’t want to screw that up.
I hope they get their video drivers sorted out then
See this Dell owner’s struggle to get a usable refresh rate for his CRT – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1334462
[...] Dell Shows Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Some Love As Canonical prepares to launch Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) in April 2010, there are signs Dell will show considerable love to the Long Term Support (LTS) release. Here are some preliminary details about Dell’s look at Ubuntu 10.04. [...]
Leo’s right about rolling updates to a LTS release, with a focus on Firefox and the other ‘major’ apps. But keeping an app like Firefox back-ported is a lot harder than it sounds. Because Firefox uses GTK+ for its GUI, newer versions tend to go with the flow and adopt the latest GTK+ stuff. So when you want to back-port to an older distro, you’ve got to upgrade GTK+, which will probably push you to upgrade GNOME, and so on.
Also, there are apps that embed bits of Firefox. Unless the API’s for this are constant, there’s gonna be breakage.
The truth is that the desktop toolkits for Linux are just not ‘done’ enough to be able to backport apps to an older distro. This has always been and remains Windows’ biggest strength. Not that their API’s are particularly good, but that they’re pretty comprehensive, and they don’t change much. I don’t know that there’s a solution for this in the Linux world (but don’t tell Dell that…).
@littlenoodles: good point. However, you can statically link these libs if needed. You’ll get a fatter binary, but I am sure very many people would not care a bit about it. In the Windows world, you re right about API stability, also simplicity (try to write sound in Linux, what API should you write about? Pulse Audio? Alsa? ESD? OSS?). But I think, also most software packages are mostly self contained.
I prefer, personally, the Linux way and keep my computers updated to the latest release. I just happen to notice that a large chunk of the population seems to prefer a different model (with less risk and less reward), and maybe we can adapt for them
The problem is, indeed, old hardware and new kernels.
When Intrepid came out, my PCs with Intel integrated graphics stopped working.
That was fixed with Jaunty, but then my PCs with Nvidia stopped working.
That was fixed in Karmic, but the my PCs without temperature/fan sensor Linux drivers stopped working.
Each time the problem was with the kernel.
So, my company sticks with long-term server releases for this reason. Once all the hardware bugs are worked out, we don’t update the kernel. There is too little hardware QA from the Linux kernel developers (not that Windows is any better, and we like neither the interface nor price of Apple).
i m currently using lucid lynx on my dell laptop…must say ..i am startin 2 luv it…still not as gr8 as windows7…still good enuff 4 me since i have almost given up pc gaming.
[...] So, with everything backed up and the iso burnt, I ran 10.04 it live briefly to check for major problems. I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 (in yellow, naturally) and on the first upgrade or two had some nasty issues. Sound, for instance, took a lot of fiddling in alsa mixer and config files, which was rather traumatic. The webcam wouldn’t work immediately in Cheese, and I recall some awful wireless problems but am sure those were back in the day of my Compaq and a Broadcom driver. In any case, whilst it seems Dell don’t ship laptops with Ubuntu any more, they do support it – apparently even attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit. [...]