Ubuntu 5.10 Released Today
For those of you who don’t know I think Ubuntu Linux is one of the most interesting, exciting and useful new things to hit IT in the last year. In the less than 1 year since their first release they have:
- Released a high-quality distro 2 more times (as of today!)
- built a sizable community of developers and maintainers
- Gathered a huge international community of people who help new users
- Brought the “it-just-works” philosophy to a whole new level in the Linux world
- Made their distribution popular with people new to Linux, as well as kernel hackers
They spend their entire advertising budget shipping free CD’s to anyone who asks for one. There are going to be release parties all around the world today and tomorrow.
I started using Ubuntu Linux last November when I could not get ZABBIX to compile on my SUSE 9.0 box because some of SUSE’s MySQL and NetSNMP libraries used non-standard compile options, and would not link up correctly.
While I was recompiling and getting these things running on SUSE, I installed Ubuntu on another box, just to test it out, and before you know it ZABBIX was working on the Ubuntu box without having to re-compile anything.
And I fell in love with the clean interface and user friendly setup. To me the most amazing thing is that the setup is very friendly to both nubies and “power-users,” which works great for me because I find that no matter how much I learn, sometimes I’m still a nubie.
I think the Ubuntu people understand how Viral Marketing works, and are making a remarkable product which has the potential to change the way we interact with our computers and perhaps more importantly the way we interact with the people that build the software we run.
Interacting with the Ubuntu community is great due to the simple — but extraordinarily powerful — code of conduct. This is probably the most important hack the Ubuntu people have come up with, in terms of creating a thriving community, and bringing in new developers. Which goes to show that some of the biggest market changing innovations are not particularly technical, or even all that new.
If you are interested in learning more, please visit http://ubuntudetroit.org/tour/quicktour.html
P.S. If you install Ubuntu 5.10 you might also be interested in an installer for MP3 and other multi-media support — Easy Ubuntu.