How Dapper is Drake?

Why So Pupular?

Yes, I know you're sick of hearing about Ubuntu. Ubuntu this, Ubuntu that, everyone must love Ubuntu or else. Don't run away screaming just yet, because there are good reasons for all the Ubuntu buzz. The first one is they have an excellent and productive PR machine. This is a good thing, and there is no reason other Linuxes cannot follow suit. Don't whine about Ubuntu getting all the attention, because anyone can email or phone some journalists and get something going.

The second reason is they are doing a lot of interesting and inventive things:

• LiveCD with one-button hard disk installer
• Nicely customized, single-CD installation
• Large friendly user community
• Up-to-date packages
• Shiny new server distribution
• Shiny new release for UltraSPARC
• Officially certified for DB2 and MySQL

The current release, Dapper Drake, is called Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, for "Long-Term Support." This means it will receive security updates for five years. (Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu's parent company, and its partners also offer paid commercial support.) With this release Canonical introduces its first separate server edition. It comes with a pre-fab Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) stack, packages appropriate for a server and "server" kernels. Just like "real" Debian, the official release includes only genuine Free software. Non-Free software is available in separate, unsupported repositories, which makes it easy for users to choose and to control what goes into their systems.