Ubuntu streamlines for next release

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The Ubuntu Technical Board, one of the governing bodies of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, made a pair of announcements about the next revision of Ubuntu, scheduled for an April release as version 7.04. Rather than unveiling new capabilities, however, the board disclosed two key omissions from the upcoming operating system release.

In a statement issued by Matt Zimmerman, chairman of the Ubuntu Technical Board, the group announced its intention to downgrade support for the PowerPC platform. Citing a waning footprint of PowerPC Macintosh machines due to the lack of a mainstream PPC hardware manufacturer, minimal demand for PPC installations and the difficulties involved in supporting the platform, the group said that it will continue to produce a PPC edition, but on an unofficial basis and with a greater reliance on community support.

Until now, Ubuntu had supported 32-bit x86, 64-bit AMD64, and PowerPC architectures at the top tier, setting Ubuntu apart from most major Linux packagers whose flirtations with PPC ended long ago if they ever even got started. Ubuntu is already committed to support one release of its operating system, 6.06 LTS released in June 2006, through mid-2011 on PowerPC, and did not backtrack from that commitment.

The second development involves the postponement of a next-generation desktop, due to a clash among some developers and users over the necessity to deploy closed-source video card drivers and a perceived lack of stability and maturity among the Linux codebase being considered. The earliest specifications for the 7.04 release classified these desktop improvements as "Essential", and recommended using either the Beryl or Compiz code layers to provide a more modern desktop in line with competitors such as Windows Vista and Mac OS X. This implementation has officially been deferred but not closed, meaning that Ubuntu 7.04 will continue to look much like its predecessors and will not ship closed-source video drivers by default.

In the statement, Zimmerman made it clear that this issue will not go away. "The desktop effects technology involved in this proposal is important in enabling a richer, more immersive desktop experience, and as such, is relevant to the mission of the Ubuntu project," he says. Although Ubuntu has generally stayed closer to a purely open-source model than some of its commercial peers, the organization has a clause in its charter which condones the use of closed-source drivers where comprehensive open-source alternatives do not exist, and the complex and often secretive realm of GPU performance has exhibited a gulf between closed and open source for some time.

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