| Ubuntu project releases new alpha, delays final |
Mar. 14, 2006
Alpha 5 (also referred to as "Flight CD") of the Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu 6.04 "Dapper Drake" version was released Monday, along with the news that Ubuntu founder and entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth wants to add an extra six weeks to the development of the final Dapper Drake distribution for QA purposes.
Dapper Drake, positioned as the distro's first "enterprise quality" release, will be the first Ubuntu version to have increased support commitments: 36 months for the desktop versions and 60 months for servers, as compared to 18 months for the current 5.10 "Breezy Badger" version.
Shuttleworth explained his position regarding the Ubuntu releases delay on the main Ubuntu users' list on Friday.
"I'm writing to propose a six-week delay in the release date of Dapper, in order to do additional validation, certification, localisation, and polish," Shuttleworth wrote. "We have a very good track record of meeting our six monthly release dates, and that reputation is not something I want to compromise.
"However, in some senses Dapper is a 'first' for us, in that it is the first 'enterprise quality' release of Ubuntu, for which we plan to offer support for a very long time. I, and others, would very much like Dapper to stand proud amongst the traditional enterprise linux releases from Red Hat, Debian, and SUSE as an equal match on quality, support and presentation," he wrote.
The Flight 5 alpha of Dapper Drake has changes that affect both the installer and live CD, including:- a much improved version of Espresso, the live CD-based installer;
- a new default theme
- NetworkManager has received a lot of attention and bugfixes
- the X autoconfiguration on AMD64 has been improved, and
- a new development version of Gnome
For more details, see the release announcement.
You can download the live Ubuntu CD (585 MB) here.
As always, the Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu live and installation ISO images, as well as BitTorrent files for the three supported architectures, are available from the project's download server.
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