The Ubuntu buzz

There have been a lot of positive things going on in the Ubuntu space, but there has been at least one change where a Ubuntu consumer has returned to good old Debian - one of the first adopters, SimplyMEPIS. Warren Woodford found that the LTS version, 6.06 of Ubuntu, upon which SimplyMEPIS has been based since V6.0, receives security updates but otherwise few, if any, new packages.

Therefore, he is returning to using Debian and will extract new packages, either from the binaries or from Debian sources.

That said, there are some really nice releases that have come out since the LTS release - Feisty Fawn, the 7.04 April release, has been a great success, and Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Linux Mint, Pioneer Linux, and hopefully soon, Linspire and Freespire, will be based off this release.

The October release, Gutsy Gibbon, 7.10, has had two Tribe releases - Alpha releases and is on the third one now, gearing up for October. This release should have better X.org support and will move in the direction of more truly free multimedia drivers - it may not make it all the way, but is an important step in that direction.

Ubuntu continues to be a solid release, and as best as I can tell, shares the fixes it finds to Debian Experimental and Debian Unstable, which make it back into Debian core when it moves to testing and stable.

For that matter, Debian Etch, though already beginning to age, is a truly excellent release in its own right, well worth trying out. I ran it earlier this week and was VERY happy with it. I have been running a modified Linux Mint and a modified Pioneer Linux, both Feisty Fawn code bases, and both are running flawlessly. This note was entered on a Kubuntu-ized instance of Pioneer Linux. Very nice, as was Linux Mint.