Yesterday, to my surprise, when I went to LinuxToday, I found that I had been aggregated!

For those (like my wife) who don’t know what this means, it’s more or less the equivalent of a garage band being discovered and being invited to play at The Apollo.  I’ve wanted to have my Linux-related blog posts aggregated on there for years.  I’m happy to finally make it.  I hope this means I’ll be there more often.  Of course, I’m a little disappointed that this post was the one they chose to spotlight.  I have had so many better written Linux-related articles.  Oh well, better to get my blog out there and hopefully get posted more often than to never be posted at all.

So gNewSense 2.0 came out a few days ago as the gNewSense crew is tracking Ubuntu LTS releases. Of course, the bad part is that there is no upgrade path from gNewSense 1.0 to 2.0. Ubuntu recommends upgrading by going from release to release so upgrading is not feasible (or is too hard for the developers to implement) so freedom lovers need to have a good backup strategy.

Since I reviewed gNewSense 1.0, I wanted to structure this review as comparing and contrasting this release to the last one to see where the progress has come. They have a much cooler looking desktop background. There wasn’t anything wrong with the last one - it just didn’t have as much of a cool factor. They still have ugly icons on the screen.

Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron will be released today.  As the name implies, 8.04 will be Hardy because it is a Long Term Support (LTS) version.  This means that for 18 months they will release security updates.  What does that really mean?  It means that if you like Ubuntu, but don’t feel like upgrading every six months, you can stick with Hardy Heron for 3 release cycles.  You won’t get the latest programs, but you’ll get security updates to protect you against crackers, viruses, and other malicious things.

I’ve always been the first to jump to the defenses of people who love creating more distros and programs. After all, if everyone just stuck to the established distros we would never have had Ubuntu and perhaps Linux would still be just a curiousity to most. However, I just didn’t see the purpose in both Gobuntu and gNewSense. First of all, they’re both based on Ubuntu. It’s not even that one is Ubuntu and one is Debian or that one is Ubuntu and one is Red Hat-based. That would have made sense to me as perhaps they liked a different packaging format or something.