Ubuntu 6.06 Beta released

Beta versions for the various flavours of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS have been announced.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (long-term support) will be the first Ubuntu release to be supported for three years on the desktop, and five years on the server.

Development of this LTS version has had the focus on stability. While previous versions of Ubuntu have been supported for 18 months, this version is targetted at those organisations that can’t upgrade operating systems every six months.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 5.10 to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Beta, follow these
instructions:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperUpgrades

The final version of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is expected to be released in June. At
that time, we will mail pressed Desktop CDs free of charge.

For this version, the Live CD has been renamed “Desktop CD” since you can install from it. This will now be the default CD to distribute to end users, since they can try out the desktop environment by booting off the CD, and then they can proceed to install on the hard drive from this live environment.

However for system integrators and OEMs, the text-based installer CD remains the preferred media since it has an “oem” installer mode which doesn’t create the user account(s) during installation. This means that it can be preloaded onto systems, and when the end user boots for the first time they are prompted to create a user account at that point.

Also note that the Desktop CD does not contain deb packages, so you can only install packages on your newly-installed 6.06 system if you have an internet connection to download them from the Ubuntu archives. If you need to install packages such as build-essential without an internet connection, the text-mode install CD is what you need.

The beta release announcements for the Ubuntu family are here:

• Ubuntu, based on the GNOME desktop
• Kubuntu, based on KDE
• Xubuntu, based on the lightweight Xfce desktop environment
• Edubuntu, a classroom distro for education, with LTSP support, and
• Ubuntu ports, for UltraSparc, IA64 and HPPA CPUs.