In April Canonical released Ubuntu 8.04 LTS more popularly known as Hardy Heron. It was the eighth Ubuntu version to be released so far but more importantly it is an LTS release which means that it would be supported 3 years for the desktop and five years for the servers.
The word LTS or “Long Term Support” brings three things to my mind stability, stability and stability. This is because it means trust from the corporates, newbies and server market where Ubuntu so far languishes. The last LTS release Dapper Drake was a landmark release in many ways it was extremely stable, had lots of features, and was easy to use. Till this day I remember Dapper as the Linux version which shifted me to Linux. I still consider it as the release which brough Gold Standard to the Ubuntu Linux.
Now with such a history of remarkable success that Dapper had, Hardy falls far too short. Though Hardy ran fine in my PC to an extent that I could call it good and had great set of features but however I did not find it so much better than Gutsy than Dapper was than Breezy. Many people are having lots of problems with Hardy. In fact things that worked in Gutsy did not work in Hardy. In my case for instance Compiz does not work as I made it work in Gutsy.
Getting to my point, Hardy though a good distro is not great enough to be labelled as an LTS release. It has many enhancements and is a good upgrade option as a normal release however it does not set a gold standard as Dapper did. Developers have focused less on stability for Hardy than they should have and the result Hardy cannot be called as a rock stable release.
In my humble opinion, Hardy shouldn’t have been released as an LTS. The developers should have released Hardy as a standard release and should have tested, and debugged for six more months and should have released its next version as LTS. By that time the final version of Firefox 3 would have been out and so would have been Open Office 3. Numerous bugs which are present in Hardy would have been ironed out and it could have been a release which truly deserves to be called an LTS release. However as things stand now Hardy is the LTS release and we would have to wait for two years to see what Canonical would deliver in its next LTS release. For the time being the Ubuntu developers are releasing Hardy 8.04.1 in July and I hope it irons out several bugs and does make Hardy deserving to qualify as an LTS release.
And let us see what Intrepid has store for us.
Forget Hardy, there are still confirmed bugs on launchpad from Hoary. Long live Mint!
By: 67GTA on May 15, 2008
at 6:23 pm
I have to agree. I am noting failure to install on fresh hardware for both the i386 and ia64 branches. The condition seems more relevant on SATA enabled boards but I have had similar problems with boards lacking SATA. Most common problem — install kicks you to BusyBox cmdl and refuses to budge any further on the install. All attempts at kernel options I have tried fail on these boards.
No am I talking ancient hardware here. I have had this occur on less than year old ASUS and TYAN boards.
By: JohnMc on May 15, 2008
at 9:13 pm
For me, Emerald did not run without first entering in a command line in advanced desktop settings. That was only after being lucky enough to find that solution via a google search. I used Emerald straight out of the box with Gutsy, though. Well, Ubuntu, I still love ya, and Hardy is now just as good with the tweak.
By: Joe Dirt on May 16, 2008
at 1:41 am
To 67 GTA: There would be bugs always on each software, no matter how old it is. However Hardy has some glaring bugs which must be ironed out quickly. Also Hoary was not an LTS release.
By: Anurag Panda on May 16, 2008
at 4:54 am
To JohnMc: You must surely be using an old release of Ubuntu and not Hardy. I assure you Ubuntu has no problems with SATA whatsoever. I use ASUS M2A-VM with a SATA HD and DVD-RW and it runs fine.
Problems only occur when I boot GeeXboX (which I downloaded in 2006( using my SATA DVD-RW and it runs in Busybox. But GeeXboX runs fine in my second Optical Drive which is PATA.
Also I’m sure new releases of GeeXboX would not have this problem either.
By: Anurag Panda on May 16, 2008
at 4:58 am
Dear Mr Panda,
I’m sorry you feel that HH is not worthy of LTS. I have read every email concerning HH that Google Alert throws up, and your view is in something of a small minority.
Probably there are workarounds which can download from the repsitories; there is no need to do anything as drastic and returning to Windows. And II is just over 5 months away
By: Charles N on May 16, 2008
at 5:34 am
To Charles N
Of course! I am not even thinking of returning to Windows. What made you think that.
And I did not mean I do not like Hardy at all. I like Hardy but I feel it is not great enough to be an “LTS” like Dapper was at its time.
By: Anurag Panda on May 16, 2008
at 6:01 am
Funny, it was just a couple years ago people were saying the same thing about Dapper not being stable enough for an LTS release. Then an incremental release, 6.06.1 came out and everything was good again.
Same thing will happen with Hardy, although individual fixes will be pushed out with the regular updates.
As if we could expect everything to work great out of the box for everyone when new software is released. To what perfect system are you comparing it to? If you want real stability, you sit and wait for everyone else to test things for you before you commit.
If you want to maintain a stable system and still play with new toys, hey, that’s what virtualization is for!
By: jimcooncat on May 16, 2008
at 2:10 pm
To jimcooncat:
I hope you are right and 8.04.01 fixes most ofl the problem.
I do not mean that Hardy should be devoid of problems but it has more problems than it should have.
By: Anurag Panda on May 16, 2008
at 4:34 pm