Ubuntu 8 due out tomorrow

Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 23 Apr 2008 at 6:45 AM

Ubuntu, the Linux distribution that everyone loves to love, is due out with their regularly scheduled new version tomorrow (Thursday), Ubuntu 8.04. The version number is derived from the date – 8 for 2008 and 04 for April.

I’ve had some concerns about Ubuntu in the past, but they’ve really done a good job with eliminating problems people encounter. The past couple of versions have installed easily for me on both laptops and desktops.

This new version 8 will be getting some LTS love. That’s Long Term Support. So version 8.04 will be around for at least three years. So if you install it and don’t like to upgrade, you’ll be supplied with security and enhancement updates for three years.

The Ubuntu project was started by Mark Shuttleworth, who is a 34-year-old billionaire from South Africa. He made his initial money by founding Thawte in 1995 and then later selling it to Verisign in 1999.

So Ubuntu will be around. It’s got financial backing from Shuttleworth’s company Canonical Ltd., and it has the support of a large, vibrant community.

They have 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the operating system available. If you have a fairly recent processor (e.g. Core 2), you can run the 64-bit version. The main reason you’d want to run the 32-bit version is on older hardware or for out-of-the-box support for the Flash plug-in. For some reason, there is still not a 64-bit version of Flash on any platform as far as I know. You can run Flash on a 64-bit OS, but you’ll have to run a 32-bit version of the browser to do it. This Adobe TechNote explains. People have been clamoring for 64-bit Flash for years, as this post on Slashdot from 2005 about Macromedia Flash indicates. Here’s an Adobe blog post from 2006 claiming they’re working on it.

But Flash aside, Ubuntu 8 is looking good. Download available tomorrow.

Update: It looks like 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 has an easier installation process for 32-bit Flash. Now you can install Flash directly from the Add/Remove screen, just like everything else, and in the case of Flash, it’ll automatically download all the 32-bit libraries that it needs. So the installation of Adobe Flash is completely transparent. A non-technical user wouldn’t really even know the difference – although I suppose it could be argued that a non-technical user might be better off running the 32-bit build of Ubuntu 8.04. At any rate, having used Ubuntu 8.04 for several days now, I can easily say that it’s a great improvement on previous versions – Ubuntu continues to get better.

Tags: free software · freedom · mark shuttleworth · ubuntu · ubuntu 8.04

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