Ubuntu 7.10 gets closer; Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 2 released

If stability is a must, you won’t want to install yesterday’s Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 2 prelease, but if you’re a Ubuntu developer — or you’re curious and would like to help up with testing, bug reporting, and so on — by all means, go for it.

“Tribe 2 is the second in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Gutsy development cycle,” said the release announcement. “The Tribe images are known to be reasonably free of show-stopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Gutsy.”

The release announcement points out a few known bugs, which don’t need to be reported, and offers caveats and/or workarounds:

• Manual partitioning hangs the desktop CD installer indefinitely. Quit the installer and then run sudo killall ubiquity, then sudo ubiquity from a terminal window.
• Enabling restricted drivers for your video card when installing from the LiveCD may result in required driver packages not being installed, thus the GUI will not start. So install the system before enabling these drivers.
• If you’re doing an Edubuntu server install, “Building LTSP root” appears to take a very long time with no discernible progress. Be patient; it will finish eventually.
• Again, on an Edubuntu server install, the default DHCP configuration for thin clients doesn’t work, so they won’t boot from the server. Remove the ‘next-server’ line from /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf and restart the DHCP server using sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart .

This new alpha release enables the 3D OpenGL Compiz window management by default. If you experience any graphical weirdness, the developers encourage you to report it.

New in this version (and the simultaneous release of Edubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu): GNOME 2.19.4, Gnash (open source Flash player), XDG user directories, and Firefox 3.

If you’re not going to install it but you want to see what it looks like, Phoronix has screen shots. If you do want to play with it, you’ll find the releases here:

• Ubuntu downloads
• Kubuntu downloads
• Edubuntu downloads
• Xubuntu downloads

The final Gutsy release is scheduled for October.

Shirl Kennedy is the senior editor of theDocuTickerandResourceShelfWeblogs as well as the “Internet Waves” columnist forInformation Today. She has been writing about technology since 1992.