Ubuntu 8.04 was released earlier this week. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror. This is a "Long Term Support" (LTS) release, meaning that updates will be available for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years for servers.
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Ubuntu 7.10 was released today. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror. Notable new features include:
- Improved support for multiple monitors, rotatable monitors, etc.
- Plug and play printer detection
- NTFS writing support out-of-box
- Kernel "dynamic ticks", meaning that the kernel doesn't have to wake up 1000 times per second any more, thus saving power.
- Full or partial hard disk encryption selectable at install time
Okay, this still isn't "research" news, but I like it.
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By way of Ars Technica, we find that Citrix (whose software provides virtual Windows desktop environments accessible anywhere, among other things) has purchased XenSource, the commercial arm of the Xen hypervisor virtualization project. Hopefully they'll make it less of a pain to use and deploy Xen.
Also, VMware went public last Tuesday with a successful IPO. Hopefully they'll keep putting out non-commercial freeware like VMware server and player. Maybe we'll some day seen a free (but likely crippled) version of ESX?
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By way of slashdot, we find that the Linux kernel (2.6.23 and up) now sports three virtualization techniques out-of-box: KVM, Xen (just merged), and Lguest (also recently merged).
Lguest in particular looks interesting, as it doesn't require virtualization hardware support (like KVM), but is as simple as a single modprobe (as opposed to the Xen behemoth). Performance isn't too great right now, though (-30%).
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The ext3cow file system has been released for the 2.6 Linux kernel. This extension to ext3 adds "copy on write" (cow) functionality, which in turn allows the user to view the file system as it existed in the past. Unlike fixed checkpointing, this means that a user could dial in any time whatsoever, and see a consistent filesystem from that moment. It would be interesting to see what the performance characteristics of the system are.
If you're interested, you can get it from ext3cow.com; it consists of a kernel patch based on kernel 2.6.20.3, as well as some userland tools.
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Ubuntu 7.04 was released today. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror.
Okay, maybe this isn't "research" news, but I still like it.
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