Canonical’s next version of its widely popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, codenamed Hardy Heron, will be version 8.04 and will feature Long Term Support. Ubuntu has been, for the last few years, striving to create an operating system that is a free and easy to use alternative to Windows.
One of Canonical’s services, Launchpad is a community site dedicated to bug tracking, feature requests, and package building. Its a novel approach to having one interface for the many different types of developers that help put Ubuntu together.
One feature of Launchpad, the blueprints area, is a place both developers and the avid Ubuntu user can go and request features to the point of actually specifying details on how they think the feature should be implemented. For Hardy Heron, there are currently 6 “Essential” features, 10 “High Priority” features, 18 “Medium Priority” features, 9 “Low Priority” features, and 1 undefined priority feature.
I’d like to discuss the features that I think are quite important, or just plain cool, that are in the pipe for the next version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron 8.04 LTS.
Since Hardy Heron will be the 2nd Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, much planning has gone into the way it will be upgraded, considering some users will be upgrading not from Gutsy Gibbon, but from the last LTS version, Dapper Drake. Currently, the best way to upgrade would be go upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, then to Feisty, then to Gutsy, then finally to Hardy to ensure all the proper configuration files have been updated correctly. The Ubuntu developers would rather be able to have something similar to the way non-LTS releases are handled. Synaptic and Adept both look for a meta-release file in the repository. If its found, it alerts the user that a distribution upgrade is available for download and installation. This works fine from standard release to standard release. What the developers would like to add is something very similar, perhaps meta-release-lts or something that would alert an LTS installation that another LTS version is available for download and installation.
Hardy will be shipping with the currently-in-progress kernel 2.6.24, which adds some nice features for an LTS release. Features such as the b43 broadcom wireless driver set, various other wireless driver sets, the mac80211 stack, dynamic ticking for 64-bit x86, and cpuidle will allow for greater usability for end users, and a little bit less of a power bill for everyone.
PulseAudio, already being used in Fedora, will hopefully help with sound server stability once it becomes more popular. Hardy developers are working diligently to get PulseAudio integrated into the next version of Ubuntu. The hope is that once there is one uniform audio stack, similar to Apple’s CoreAudio and to a lesser degree Window’s DirectX audio stack, many different types of users will be able to have audio function under Linux as well as it does under OS X and Windows, from the everyday user to professional audiophiles.
KDE 4.0 will be released sometime in January (maybe) and therefore will fit within the timeframe to have it included in Hardy. As it is right now, KDE 3.5 will be the default version of KDE for the Kubuntu distribution, but KDE4 will be installable as a simple upgrade. It looks as though Hardy+1 will see KDE4 as the default for Kubuntu. Because of that, Kubuntu will be playing catchup with Ubuntu this time around. Right now Ubuntu is ahead of Kubuntu in a few key areas, such as printing tools, compiz, codec install, laptop panel brightness controls, XDG home directories, user hard drive mounting, and Ubuntu’s nice “Bulletproof X” feature. Hopefully all these features become equivalent in Kubuntu for Hardy Heron.
A few other areas are getting looked at too, mostly under-the-hood features and requirements such as better hardware detection and handling, and a rewrite of the restricted drivers manager. Prefetch looks to be a promising technology that Hardy will inherit from the Google Summer of Code competition. PolicyKit and AppArmor are getting some fine tuning for this release as well.
Ubuntu is shaping up to be a very viable alternative to Windows on the PC. Here’s hoping Hardy Heron, due out in April of 2008, will push the envelope even farther.
