Ubuntu: a success story in pictures

Original author: Michael Larabel
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The Debian distribution has been on the market for over a decade, Gentoo for five years, and Mandriva / Mandrake for almost ten. But their achievements simply fade compared to the success of the Ubuntu distribution, which in less than three years has gained simply stunning popularity.

The authors of the Phoronix.com blog tried to analyze how the new Linux distribution managed to achieve such success in such a short time. They published the story of Ubuntu in pictures .

The Ubuntu project was founded by Mark Shuttleworth in February 2004 under the name no-name-yet.com (now this site is redirected to ubuntu.com) The financing was undertaken by Canonical Limited, a brand owned company. Ubuntu distributions were created on the basis of Debian –unstable and were released (with one exception) in a six-month cycle, in accordance with GNOME releases.

From the very beginning, the company has been distributing free CD-ROMs with the distribution kit to everyone, and still does. For three years, Ubuntu identified Fedora, Debian, SuSE and all other Linux distributions by popularity ( DistroWatch statistics ), became a common topic of discussion on digge, on Habré (we have 124 references to Ubuntu , while SUSE, for example, has everything 45 and Debian has 21) and other social news sites. In terms of PR and publicity, no one can compare with Ubuntu.

Five versions of Ubuntu have been released to date: 4.10 Warty Warthog, 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog, 5.10 Breezy Badger, 6.06 Dapper Drake, and 6.10 Edgy Eft. In April of this year, 7.04 Feisty Fawn will appear. On the pages of the Ubuntu history in pictures you can see screenshots of each of these versions.

The first version 4.10, Warty Warthog, was released in October 2004 and was based on the Linux 2.6.7 kernel, XFree86 4.3.0.1, and GNOME 2.8. The system could be started from LiveCD (for comparison, official Fedora distributions in the form of LiveCD appeared only in 2006). The first Ubuntu desktop was a dreadfully plain brown by default.



In the next version 5.04, Hoary Hedgehog (based on X.Org 6.8.2, Linux 2.6.10, and GNOME 2.10) has significantly improved the graphics theme.



The Breezy Badger 5.10 family of distributions (GNOME 2.12.1, Linux 2.6.12, and X.Org 6.8.2.) Introduced an “educational” version of Edubuntu and server support. Among the new features of LiveCD - support for OEM-installations and the launchpad (launchpad).



The 6.06 release of Dapper Drake (GNOME 2.14, Linux 2.6.15, and X.Org 7.0) was originally planned for April 2006, but Mark Shuttleworth moved it to June 1. This was the first Ubuntu distribution for which Long Term Support was guaranteed: three years for desktops and five years for servers. Previous distributions have been supported by Canonical for 18 months.



Version 6.10 Edgy Eft (GNOME 2.16, Linux 2.6.17, X.Org 7.1) was released four months after Dapper Drake and was distinguished by the presence of Tomboy sticky notes editor and F-Spot photo album manager in the kit. In this distribution, developers for the first time abandoned dark brown colors and made the default graphic theme more aesthetically pleasing.



The upcoming 7.04 Feisty Fawn (GNOME 2.18.0, X.Org 7.2.0, Linux 2.6.20 / 2.6.21) is scheduled for release in April 2007 and promises to please with many pleasant improvements, such as support for network roaming, failsafe X and much more, including a migration wizard from other Ubuntu's Migration Assistant operating systems .


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