I thought I’d share some of the quick news so far from the Ubuntu Live conference. From what I can gather there are not a lot of us from the community side here (if you are, please come find us!) There are a few key points that I thought I’d share with the rest of you from this mornings keynotes.
Mark Shuttleworth spoke first and gave us what seemed to be an Ubuntu State of the Union address and a bit of a future roadmap. Current estimates put Ubuntu user base between six and twelve million (hard to measure, of course). It is also currently being used in two-hundred countries and growing. I am surprisingly not surprised at these numbers. Ubuntu’s popularity is soaring and it only looks like its going up!
Ubuntu 8.04 (Gutsy +1) will be the next LTS release and LTS will be scheduled for every two years. Just as the 6 month cycle is expected and adhered to (with the exception of Dapper), the LTS cycle will be adhered to as well. This will put is with LTS at 6.06.1, 8.04, 10.04, etc.
There is more to catch up on but I better run now.. you’ll hear more from me later.
Sweet! That is great news. I have been theorizing that the LTS release would be scheduled every 2 years. This is great news!
Ubuntu’s release schedule gives people the best of both worlds. Many users like to see new applications and fancy visual improvements as often as possible. These users can upgrade to the new version every 6-months, and also use the backports repository. (They can even test the beta-releases if they don’t mind the possibility of breaking their system!)
Large enterprises do not want to upgrade their computers every six-months, and they do want a highly tested, stable system. This is even more important if they are running Ubuntu Servers. These users will likely choose to only run LTS releases.
That’s good news!
Is there any detail about the upgrading process from one LTS to another? Normally, only upgrading to the next version is supported. But what about a way to get from one LTS installation to another? Even 3 years desktop support don’t last forever…
Fredo,
In my opinion, they are going to have to offer an LTS to LTS upgrade. Enterprises don’t want to spend hours performing four complete upgrades from 6.06 to 8.04.
Tristan