Last night at the Debian Special Interest Group (Sydney Linux User Group) No-Name-Yet.com / Canonical / Ubuntu was revealed to the public. The mystery is no more! I was so excited by this that on Monday I was checking Virgin Blue’s flights. On reflection, the $350 can be better spent, but it was really something that I’m interested in.

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that is based on Debian. I’ve heard it described as what Debian would be if it had slightly ‘user friendlier’ guidelines, and some full time staff. What does that mean? Debian is well known for the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which sometimes restrict non-free software from being part of the Debian project. Lately, things like binary-only drivers have been a problem. On top of this, Debian has over 1,000 active developers, and 10,000 packages. This sized community means that it’s difficult to steer Debian in any new directions as required. Just check up the in-fighting on the debian-devel mailing list…

Ubuntu is a project from Canonical, a group comprised of some noteworthy Debian and GNOME developers. It’s basically the who’s-who of open source. Jeff Waugh, Matt Zimmerman, Daniel Stone, Ross Burton, Benjamin Mako-Hill… People that get my attention when they talk.

Rumour has it that this guy is funding Canonical, and reading his bio he sounds like the kind of dude that might. Watch out Billy G, there’s a cool nerd chasing your crown. I’ve always quietly wondered why some uber-rich guy hasn’t thrown their weight behind a Linux distribution in the past; maybe I’ve been wrong, or maybe Mark Shuttleworth (does anyone else find it ironic he went into space with that surname?) is reading my thoughts. Right. Now.

This new distribution is focussed on 6-monthly releases encapsulating the latest and greated software. As an example, the public preview launch last night coincided with the launch of GNOME 2.8. At the moment, their release cycle is planned to match GNOME’s. This is a huge step forward, because Debian has a release every 18-24 months. One of the big criticisms of Debian is that it’s too old. The stable release (Woody) is now 26 months old! For servers, this is acceptable, but as more and more people are looking at Linux on the desktop, it’s just not going to cut it. Sure, using Sarge (testing) or Sid (unstable) means that you have have more bleeding-edge machines, but that’s no good for newbies with no skill. If a package breaks something on my laptop, I can probably fix it, but Maggie definately couldn’t (Hale: could Mel?), and she’s the target audience for a lot of these new distributions. Users just want to be users, and Ubuntu might fit that gap.

Whilst Ubuntu draws on Debian package structure, the archive is different, meaning you can’t just point your source.list file at Ubuntu’s package repositories and apt-get dist-upgrade to Ubuntu. Infact, their package archive is more up-to-date, and with many of the Canonical people wearing Debian Developer hats too, this means we get the patches shipped upstream to Debian (and beyond).

Do I think another branch is good? Sure, as long as it’s not another branch that doesn’t provide innovation. I think the calibre of people attracted to Ubuntu is a clear indicator that this will be a player to watch.