I love cutting edge news, pity that its just slightly ahead of the actual release of 7.04 :)

People might just have to wait a short while for 7.04 to be stamped as release not beta.

Now that would be something worth developing. How about mounting "My Documents" to your home directory and loading Freecell under WINE - now that really *would* encourage people. More should be done!

Feisty is out on Thursday, so you won't have to wait too long ;-)

I have been coming back to sample Ubuntu since it wasn't Debian anymore :) But it just has not been able to stick. It has been a long and hard quest away from Windows - and I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever get away from it completely.

The rocky road has taken me, finally, to Mac OS X and I'm not really looking back. But the appeal of Ubuntu has never truly left. I know that it can be a great Desktop but for Laptops it has always left me a bit short - particularly with WiFi. Yes, yes, I know it can be done, but it is so hard to get working right that one tends to give up and walk away (often right back to Windows). Ubuntu's target for mass-scale take up has got to be Plug 'N Play as much as Windows and OS X is. Then it is ready for Prime Time mass take-up.

Ubuntu does rather seem to be nearly there - and so I'll be running up 7.04 on the trusty Laptop as soon as I can get it downloaded.

Sorry, which bit of this starry-eyed publicity guff did Ashlee actually write?

It's a very minor point version of Ubuntu for Chrissakes, a few tweaks and a few package updates rolled into the distro, all released on Ubuntu's ridiculous six-monthly update treadmill.

Fawning is the word. The Reg don't swallow Vista or OSX press releases and regurgitate them whole as 'articles', why the double standards when it comes to a slightly-less-totally-crap-than-all-the-others lisux release?

To Gareth Pye: I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but Ubuntu 7.04 has been released as beta for some time now - I've been using it for several weeks, since the update manager told me a new version was available and I got round to increasing the size of my boot partition - sigh.

To Danny Thompson: a nice thing about Ubuntu which you may know is that you just boot it as a live CD so that should give you some idea about how well it's going to work before you commit. Then of course you can install as a dual boot like any other distribution. You install from an icon on the live CD desktop - it's a bit surreal surfing the net on the very OS that's being installed at the time. As for wireless, Intel Centrino has worked out of the box with Linux for years now. I accept that other flavours of wi-fi hardware may be harder to support. Of course that's not Linux's fault - it's the hardware manufacturers' unwillingness to release information. Despite that, amazing things have been done by reverse-engineering, such as for the Texas Instruments ACX100/110 chip-set (I have a wifi card containing this), and the NdisWrapper package has been open-sourced, which allows Windows wi-fi drivers to be used with Linux. One fly in the ointment is the proprietary ATI accelerated graphics driver, whose current incarnation has a bug preventing it from working with things like Google Earth. I look forward to that one being fixed.

To Anonymous Windows Fanboy above (for I can reach no other conclusion): if you had said something useful or insightful it might have been worth your time and ours. When you can upgrade automatically without losing your user data, I'd have thought that the more often the releases the better, to take advantage of the astonishing pace of open source software development. It's more than a few package upgrades, as you'd know if you'd experienced it. And SuSE also has a 6-month release cycle, by the way.

Matthew Marks

Sounds like a Serious Piece of KIT.