Ubuntu Live 2008 cancelled
by Volker Weber
The Ubuntu Live conference, which was scheduled to take place July 21-22 in Portland, OR has been cancelled. We are planning to include some Ubuntu content in the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), also happening July 21-25 in Portland, Oregon.
Comments
Hum.. perhaps at Canonical they are re-thinking their strategies as coupling every new release to Gnome and FireFox hasn't proven to be a good decision. (Some people said "foolish")
According to my experience, the latest Ubuntu upgrade to Hardy Heron has been a disaster for many with the latest updates improving things from being catastrophic to merely annoying.
Please note FF3 was still in beta when Hardy was released, and Gnome far from being stable.
Definitely not good enough for a Ubuntu-Linux LTS version..
I can't complain about Hardy being unstable. I have several machines running Ubuntu (some of them 24/7) and even managed to smoothly upgrade one of them from 6.04 -> 6.10 -> 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 -- in a row, without a glitch. There was only issue when the device name of the DVDRAM drive changed during an upgrade from /dev/dvdram to /dev/dvdram1 for no reason.
Besides that, I think Ubuntu is the by far most stable and most user-friendly Linux distribution I've ever seen. Even my in-laws ditched Windows in favor of (K)Ubuntu :)
I am using Ubuntu Hardy since Beta and it was definitly not ready to release, but with the latest updates the situation has changed. Firefox ist stable except the flash problem on youtube. Ubuntu is a good distribution, but the release of hardy on time was not the best decision.
Have been running Ubuntu as my main desktop since 2.5 years now. Hardy has not been as polished as the previous versions and Canonical will have a difficult time with it since it's supposed to be long-time suppored. Its main annoyance (at least for me) has been a "it's not a bug, it's a feature" issue that is not Ubuntu-specific: Firefox 3 uses sqlite that fsyncs too often (more here and here - wonder how the Firefox developers plan to resolve this since FF3 will soon be on more Linux distributions).
That said, the conference most likely hasn't been cancelled due to the underwhelming Hardy release. Maybe not enough people signed up. Maybe the contributed papers were bad. Maybe the speakers weren't able to configure their projectors. Maybe conferences in the US don't attract that many foreign people anymore, now that US customs has turned more and more hostile towards business visitors.
New Gnome in Hardy: -0.5 to -1
Firefox 3 beta is more stable than 2.x on 32bit, so +1 here, why not.
Due to the "LTSness", 3.x is also a sensible choice, since 2.x's significance will fade away when 3.0 will be released soon.
The upgrade on my machines from feisty to gutsy brought much more side effects and weirdnesses than the gutsy to hardy upgrade, btw.
