Ubuntu - Jeff Waugh, Canonical

Talk on Ubuntu

An installation

Choose language - trimmed down installer from Debian

Automatically configure the network with DHCP (either w/wireless, wired, etc...). Will find the WEP key and stuff, and you just type it in.

Manually partitioning the disks, have happy faces and other icons! ext3 by default.

Ubuntu is a Canonical Project. There's a company funding it. 1 CD distro, with GNOME 2.8, Firefox 1, Evo 2, OOo 1.1.2, XFree86 4.3, Project Utopia - good laptop support, and also has server installation. October 22nd is the release date.

"Working on "Totally Rad" laptop support" (not cool, or anything else :))

2 releases every year - every 6 months. Warty preview comes out the day GNOME X releases happen. Eighteen month support lifecycle for high-impact, dataloss and security bugfixes.

Over 2,000 supported Debian packages, and 10,000 in the universe, but unsupported.

3 projects they are interested in:

• * Debian - commercial AND community deriviative of Debian. Canonical, through Ubuntu, will take Debian places the community can't go, by being the number one professional services and support company in the (Debian) universe.
• * Python - glue that binds everything in Ubuntu. "Python Everywhere!". Python in the base!
• * GNOME - great for GNOME developers, testers, and users. Ships the latest stable and devel releases, as soon as they're available. Might be daily cvs, or might be tarball releases - they're not sure.

Between March -> September, they had 3 employees to 37 as of yesterday. jdub was #3.

If it asks any X questions, its a bug. ddcprobe, laptop_detect, etc... all just work!

After final, there are no updates except security updates. It will be stable for 18-months.

3 archs are supported - x86, x86_64, ppc32 - 3 i386's (dual xeon's, 4gb's ram, etc..). 3 G5 XServe's. 3 x86_64's. Builds all of 'universe' in less than a week.

It asked a configuring X question (resolution!). Heh.

Debian docs are hacked to use scrollkeeper. They replaced scrollkeeper with /usr/bin/true, then only did they run...

What is Canonical's revenue stream? They are a professional services company. They have no idea how much money they actually have :) He is a technical philanthropist (Mark Shuttleworth). Not explaining the business model, because they're just going to do it.

Mailing lists, they are going to have forums soon. On the www.ubuntulinux.org site.

Drinks a lot of Sprite Recharge! Haha. Because ubuntu-users has 3 times more posts than lkml! There's a lot to read.

There is no root password. Root itself is disabled. The mouse wasn't plugged in, he plugged it in and it just worked.

Please enter _your_ password to run network-admin - all done via sudo. First user added, is a administrator.

fsck pops you to the root prompt. No password required. It is not a security problem, according to them. If your laptop is stolen, you're fucked already ;)

Bare naked desktop, no icons on the desktop, by default. There's a little Trash applet.

To get to all your stuff, you go to Computer icon, next to Applications. Plug in the USB key, it will auto-mount it, and bring up the window. Like all good demos, thats broken.

Will parse kickstart files, and do the right thing during release; it will not use anaconda, though.