Ubuntu 8.04 is Out
It was Clean Thursday yesterday and hopefully you were cleaning your hard drive for a great new Ubuntu 8.04. It made it to the download sites in the evening and since then they creak under a heaviest load.
Have you ever wondered why they version their releases in that strange way — …, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04? I never mulled over that, but yesterday I was enlightened. Look at the numbers closely: 2007.04, 2007.10, 2008.04. Alright, now it does make perfect sense, doesn’t it?
While we are at it, let me explain briefly how I partition my hard drive to aid quick and painless system upgrades. Keeping in mind that Canonical releases a new version precisely once a half year, it is judicious to keep OS on a separate partition so that it can be easily replaced, while your home directories stay intact. This is how I do it:
- / (root) partition — 5 Gb
- /home partition — 5 Gb
- swap partition — 2 Gb
Every time a new version of Ubuntu comes out, I simply format the root partition and install the release there from a Live CD. Certainly I need to restore all apps later, but it’s not a big deal actually as I maintain a nice list for this matter.
I know Ubuntu has a mechanism to upgrade itself to a newer version through the Updates manager, but, in practice, being upgraded in this fashion, OS doesn’t unveil its full potential, and more like “mimics” the previous version. I compared the two in the past and am inexpressibly happy about the discovery.
Hopefully this information will be valuable in the light of upcoming wave of upgrades.
April 30th, 2008 at 23:28
Yes! Its out and I want my worldwide holiday :P.
And I agree with you, clean install is the way to go.
I would just make a small adjustment to your partition layout.
/ (root) - minimum 5GB
swap - 2GB is ok
/home - as much as you need (or want to spare)
You can call it being picky but if you put the swap partition closer to the beginning of the disk you should have a slightly better performance when you need to access it (faster transfer rates and lower latency, seek times should be about the same on all disk)
April 30th, 2008 at 23:40
Unfortunately (may be it’s my fault) all my experience with ubuntu can be described as negative rather then pleasant,
Even though, Canonical deems it to be OS for non-professionals. I have had much more efficient and productive work with it’s ancestor - Debian GNU/Linux. One can learn that Debian is much more difficult to learn and work then Fedora, SuSe, Ubuntu, etc. But all my efforts were paying back only with Debian. That OS can be desribed as “linux the way it should be” (just my thought). In Ubuntu I always came across some minor (but very annoying) glitches. I have been “working” with 5.10, 6.10, 7.04, 7.10, and now I’ve downloaded 8.04 DVD Edition. With each installation I wanted to see really easy to use OS. But each time it turnes out to be perfect only with default packages and settings. 
Greetings from Sevastopol (Lingust).
May 1st, 2008 at 08:30
Rookie, your layout looks very much like mine since 5 Gb for home is all I need.
Sergei, it’s great to hear back from you. Haven’t talked for ages! I hope everything is great there in the group and wish you could say HI! to everyone for me.
On you Ubuntu notes, certainly it wasn’t all that smooth and nice to me too. I kept tabs on it for quite a while and gave a spin to every single release, and only the last three looked usable (to me) for one or another reason. For example, I still can’t put my (old) laptop into Suspend mode (you know, sleeping with everything still in memory) since it won’t get out of it. But it’s not a big deal.
My experience is precisely the opposite — in the past I tried Red Hat, Slackware, Free BSD, ASP Linux and many others, but once I checked Ubuntu, I no longer “jump”. It’s maybe I don’t use external packages at all — only what comes in their repositories and even that to a bare minimum.
Cheers!
P.S. Say hi to the group, SP and VV!
May 1st, 2008 at 13:01
Well you are right, using ubuntu isn’t as smooth as everybody usually says but I guess it really depends on the things you need to use. As an example I’ve tried a few distros lately and CentOS 5.1 (which is based on RedHat) just wouldn’t want to set the resolution correctly on my new TFT screen when every other distro would (that really surprised and annoyed me). Each distro has its own problems that you only notice if you use it everyday so I guess we just have to learn to live with with. Either way its still Linux, if you don’t like something you can change it :D, no fuss, no questions asked like in some other OS’s we know