July 9, 2009, 12:52 pm
“All Things have an End,” said Jonathan Swift, “and a Pudden has two.” Such is the case for Ubuntu as well, and later this month the first of the ends will come due for its longstanding legacy, the Dapper Drake.
The Ubuntu release cycle is relatively unique among Linux distributions in that it occurs exactly every six months, without exception ‚Äî almost. The odd duck amongst the Ubuntu releases is Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake ‚Äî its version numbering reveals it was released in June, while all other releases have arrived in April or October (X.04 or X.10). Nonetheless, the release was groundbreaking, including for the first time a number of features now taken for granted, among them graphical installation from the LiveCD, an improved ‚Äî and now much bemoaned ‚Äî Human theme, and a number of next-generation software packages, including MySQL 5.0, Firefox 1.5, and OpenOffice 2.0 among others…
