Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Ubuntu History

Ubuntu

Ubuntu was initially forked from the Debian project's code base.[8] The aim was to release a new version of Ubuntu every six months, resulting in a more frequently updated system. Ubuntu's first release was on 2004-10-20.[9]

Ubuntu releases always include the most recent GNOME release, and come out about a month after GNOME.[10] In contrast with previous general-purpose forks of Debian — such as MEPIS, Xandros, Linspire, Progeny and Libranet, many of which relied on proprietary and closed source add-ons as part of their business model — Ubuntu has stayed closer to Debian's philosophy and uses free (libre) software most of the time, other than some proprietary hardware drivers and codecs.[11]

The Ubuntu logo and typography has remained the same since that first release. The hand-drawn,[12] lowercase OpenType font used is called Ubuntu-Title and was created by Andy Fitzsimon.[13] The font is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and use with logos derived from the Ubuntu logo is encouraged.[13] The font is available as a package for Ubuntu.[13]

Ubuntu packages are based on packages from Debian's unstable branch: both distributions use Debian's deb package format and package management tools, APT and Synaptic, although Debian and Ubuntu packages are not necessarily binary compatible with each other, and may need to be rebuilt from source.[14] Ubuntu cooperates with Debian — to some extent pushing changes back to Debian,[15] although there has been criticism concerning lack of occurrence.[16] Many Ubuntu developers are also maintainers of key packages within Debian. However, Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, criticized Ubuntu packages for incompatibilities with Debian, saying Ubuntu had diverged too far from Debian Sarge to remain compatible.[16]

Ubuntu is currently funded by Canonical Ltd. On July 8, 2005, Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Ltd announced the creation of the Ubuntu Foundation and provided an initial funding of US$10 million. The purpose of the foundation is to ensure the support and development for all future versions of Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth describes the foundation as an emergency fund in case Canonical's involvement ends.[17]

Before release, packages are imported from Debian Unstable continuously and merged with Ubuntu-specific modifications. A month before release, imports are frozen, and soon after a feature freeze is instated, which allows for packages to work on ensuring that the current software works well, rather than supporting the moving target that is Unstable.

Ubuntu 8.04, released on April 24, 2008, is the current Long Term Support (LTS) release. Canonical has released previous LTS versions every two years, and has committed to releasing the next LTS version in 2010, two years after 8.04.[18][19][20] Meanwhile, the current standard-support period release, Ubuntu 8.10, was released on October 30, 2008.

apt-get command

apt-get command