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Ubuntu (IPA pronounciation (oo-BOON-too)) is a predominantly desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. It is sponsored by Canonical Ltd (owned by Mark Shuttleworth); the name of the distribution comes from the South African concept of ubuntu—roughly, "humanity towards others". It is released roughly every six months, more frequently than Debian; each release comes shortly after new GNOME editions. It has a stronger focus on usability than Debian. The sudo utility is used for administrator access, and the Ubiquity install tool included with the Live CD makes it possible for users to install Ubuntu straight to the hard disk without the need for a restart or change of CDs.

Ubuntu version 6.06 LTS, codenamed "Dapper Drake", was released on June 1, 2006, and will be supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server, instead of the usual 18 months. Ubuntu aims to use only free software to provide an up-to-date yet stable operating system for the average user. Ubuntu has a lively user and support community.

Kubuntu and Xubuntu are official subprojects of the Ubuntu project, aiming to bring the KDE and Xfce desktop environments to the Ubuntu core, respectively. Edubuntu is an official subproject "designed for school environments, and should be equally suitable for kids to use at home."

History and development process

Ubuntu's first release was on October 20, 2004, which began by making a temporary fork of the Debian Linux project. This was done so that a new version of Ubuntu could be released every six months, resulting in a more frequently updated system. Ubuntu releases always include the most recent GNOME release, and are scheduled to be released about a month after GNOME. In contrast with previous general-purpose forks of Debian—such as MEPIS, Xandros, Linspire, Progeny and Libranet, many of which relied on closed-source add-ons as part of their business model—Ubuntu has stayed closer to Debian's philosophy and uses free (libre) software most of the time.

Ubuntu packages have generally been based on packages from Debian's unstable branch: both distributions use Debian's deb package format and APT/Synaptic to manage installed packages. Ubuntu has contributed all changes directly and immediately back to Debian, rather than announcing them only at release time, although Debian and Ubuntu packages are not necessarily 'binary compatible' with each other. Many Ubuntu developers are also maintainers of key packages within Debian itself. However, Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, has criticized Ubuntu for incompatibilities between its packages and those of Debian, saying that Ubuntu had diverged too far from Debian Sarge to remain compatible.

There are plans for a branch codenamed Grumpy Groundhog. It will be a permanently unstable development and testing branch, pulling the source directly out of the revision control of the various programs and applications that are shipped as part of Ubuntu. This will allow power users and upstream developers to test up-to-the-minute versions of individual programs as they would appear if packaged for the distribution today, without needing to build packages themselves; it will be able to provide early warning of build failures on various architectures. It is intended that Grumpy Groundhog should merge with Debian Unstable every six months. Grumpy Groundhog has not been made available to the public yet.

Ubuntu is currently funded by Canonical Ltd. On July 8, 2005, Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd announced the creation of the Ubuntu Foundation and provided an initial funding of US$10 million. The purpose of the foundation is to ensure the support and development for all future versions of Ubuntu, but as of 2006, the foundation remains dormant. Mark Shuttleworth describes the foundation as an emergency fund in case Canonical's involvement ends.

The distribution

Features

Ubuntu focuses on usability, including the widespread use of the sudo tool for administrative tasks. sudo authenticates users against their own password rather than that of the target user to allow the delegation of specific commands to specific users on specific hosts, without sharing passwords among them and while mitigating the risk of unattended terminals. Once the user has been authenticated, the system updates a timestamp and the user may then use sudo without a password for a short period of time (five minutes unless overridden in /etc/sudoers). The Ubiquity installer (previously called Espresso) included in the LiveCD version of the "Dapper" release allows installing Ubuntu to the hard disk from within the Live CD environment without the need for restarting the computer. Ubuntu furthermore emphasises accessibility and internationalization, to reach as many people as possible. As of version 5.04, UTF-8 is the default character encoding.

Besides standard system tools and other small applications, Ubuntu comes with the pre-installed software OpenOffice, the internet browser Firefox, and the raster graphics editor GIMP. Several lightweight card and puzzle games are included.

Ubuntu offers a full feature set that works straight from the standard install, but nonetheless fits on a single CD. A Live CD and a traditional install CD have been available for each release. Live CDs allow users to see whether their hardware is compatible before installation to the hard disk. Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu CDs are mailed gratis to anyone who requests them, and CD images are available for download. Ubuntu requires 256 megabytes of RAM, and, when installed to the hard disk, needs three gigabytes of hard-disk space.

The default appearance of the user interface in the current version is characterized by the colour orange. Until April 2005, Ubuntu had an optional package called ubuntu-calendar, which downloaded a new desktop wallpaper monthly, matching the brown colour theme. These wallpapers featured partially nude people and were criticized as risqué. This led to the coining of nicknames such as "Linuxxx" and "The Porn Distro".

Package classification and support

Ubuntu divides all software into four sections, called components, to reflect differences in licensing and level of support available.

Packages are assigned to components as follows:

Free software non-free software
supported Main Restricted
unsupported Universe Multiverse

"Free" software here includes only that which meets the Ubuntu license requirements, which correspond roughly to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. (There is one caveat for Main however; it "also may contain binary firmware and selected fonts (which are used by free components of Main) that cannot be modified without permission from their authors" so long as their "redistribution is unencumbered.")

Non-free software is usually unsupported (Multiverse), but some exceptions (Restricted) are made for very important non-free software, such as non-free device drivers, without which users might be prevented from running Ubuntu on their system, particularly binary-only graphics card drivers. The level of support is more limited than for main, since the developers may not have access to the source code.

It is intended that Main and Restricted should contain all software needed for a general-use Linux system. Alternative programs for the same tasks and programs for specialised applications are placed in Universe and Multiverse.

Beyond the official repositories is Ubuntu Backports, which is an officially recognized project to backport newer versions of certain software that are available only in unstable versions of Ubuntu. The repository is not comprehensive; it mostly consists of user-requested packages, which are approved if they meet quality guidelines.

Availability of proprietary software

Ubuntu has a certification system for third party software. Ubuntu certified proprietary software should work well in Ubuntu. However, many programs familiar to users of non-free operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, are incompatible and are not Ubuntu certified. Some proprietary software that does not limit distribution is included in Ubuntu's multiverse component.

Some examples of software not distributed by Ubuntu includes:

  • Software that enables the playback of region-locked video DVDs, due to the questionable legal status of the DeCSS open-source DVD-decoding library in some parts of the world. (Note: the library is needed even when watching a DVD in the target region.)
  • Encoding and decoding libraries for many proprietary media formats such as Windows Media.
  • Some popular proprietary web-browser plugins, such as Adobe's (formerly Macromedia's) Shockwave (there is no Linux version) and Flash (a workaround to the specific prohibition against redistribution in its EULA is the multiverse package "flashplugin-nonfree" which automatically downloads the Linux Flash plugin directly from Adobe's site and then installs it)

Releases

Each release has both a code name and a version number. The version number is based on the year and month of release. For example, the very first release of Ubuntu, 4.10, was released on October 20, 2004. Below is a list of previous and planned releases.

Version Release date Code name
--- 		4.10 October 20, 2004 Warty Warthog
5.04 April 8, 2005 Hoary Hedgehog
5.10 October 13, 2005 Breezy Badger
6.06 LTS June 1, 2006 Dapper Drake
6.10 planned for October 26, 2006 Edgy Eft

Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" was released on June 1, 2006, and included GNOME 2.14 (or KDE 3.5.2 in Kubuntu), Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.3, OpenOffice 2.0.2, Xorg 7.0, GCC 4.0.3, and version 2.6.15 of the Linux kernel at release time. Several packages have been upgraded since.

Release 6.06 is labelled as a Long Term Support (LTS), to indicate that it will be supported with updates for three years on the desktop and five years on the server, with paid technical support available from Canonical Ltd. also for three and five years, respectively.

Versions

There are several versions besides Ubuntu, available as CD isos for download and—in the case of Kubuntu and Edubuntu—for free mail order from ShipIt. These simply install a different set of packages from the original Ubuntu, but since they draw additional packages and updates from the same repositories as Ubuntu, all of the same software is available for each of them. These different versions correspond to development efforts run by largely separate groups of people who try to bring different functionalities to the distribution:

  • Kubuntu, a desktop distribution using KDE rather than GNOME
  • Edubuntu, a distribution designed for classrooms using GNOME
  • Xubuntu, a "lightweight" distribution based on the Xfce desktop environment
  • Ubuntu Server Edition has been released alongside the desktop version since Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger.http://www.ubuntu.com/server This provides server applications such as an e-mail server, a LAMP web server platform, as well as tools for DNS, file serving and database management. Compared with the original desktop edition, the server edition comes as a smaller CD image and has a lower level of hardware requirements. It runs on a minimum of 500 megabytes of hard disk and 64 megabytes of RAM.

Response

The Ubuntu page on Distrowatch.com has been the most frequently accessed of their comprehensive list of Linux distributions for more than a year, and Ubuntu was awarded the Reader Award for best Linux distribution at the 2005 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in London. It has been favourably reviewed in online and print publications. Many reviewers of Ubuntu point out a main part of Ubuntu's success is the fact it has a very large community.

Derivative projects

Mark Shuttleworth has endorsed the creation of an Ubuntu-libre distribution, using only FSF-approved free software.

These projects are closely linked to Ubuntu. As of 2006, their releases are simultaneous with Ubuntu's, and packages are drawn from the same official repositories Ubuntu uses.

There are also several unofficial derivatives:

See also

References

Cited references and notes

General references

Further reading in print

Currently in print

Scheduled for release in late 2006

External links

Official online resources

Unofficial online resources

User Communities

Debian-based distributions | Linux distributions | LiveCD | Ubuntu

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Ubuntu (Linux distribution)".

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