Is Ubuntu LTS a sham?


Recommended Posts

A recent experience had me wondering whether LTS isn?t everything Canonical built it up to be. For those of you who don?t know, about 2 years ago Canonical released Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which would be supported till June 2009.

So, recently I was having some network problems on my laptop (running Windows), the network was acting sluggish and I ran an online speed test and outbound traffic was way slow. I surmised it was probably a network problem, of which I have no control over, but just to make sure it wasn?t something on my end I decided to crack out my Ubuntu 6.06 live CD and run the test on it to see if my network was at normal speed. I pop the CD in reboot and go to run the speed test. That?s when I started to run into problems.

The test needed Flash to run. I do a search in the package manager, no Flash. So I go to Adobe?s website and their Flash only supports newer versions of Ubuntu. I tried all of them anyway, hoping one would work , none of them did. I decided to try to update Firefox in the hope of apply Flash then. Doing a search in the package manager returned only updates to 2.02 or some other equally old version. I then gave up.

This experience has completely flies in the face of what Long Term Support was supposed to be. Now, I?m not going to blame this on Canonical, it was others software that wasn?t working on their system, not the theirs. Furthermore, I?m sure there is some conceivable way to install Flash on 6.06, however it is far beyond the understanding of someone who rarely uses Linux, and the problem is solved now anyway. But it makes me wonder, what else doesn?t work on 6.06? If anyone still has it installed, or is willing to install it, please reply.

Is the rest of the Linux community undermining the LTS by not supporting it? Does the LTS mean nothing to the average user?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

By LTS, it means that they support it with security etc upgrades until that date.

Flash is made by Adobe, and they're under no obligation to support older versions of Ubuntu. If there is a security update for a supported version of flash on 6.06, it will probably be in the repo.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To the average user, no, the LTS version is just another release. The average user is likely to upgrade to the next version when it arrives.

To corporate users LTS means that it can be deployed and setup safe in the knowledge that there will be fixes and security updates for the next 3 years. This doesn't necessarily mean that apps like Firefox will be updated to the latest version, or indeed plugins like Flash. In a corporate environment, you need reliabilty. The latest software versions don't always provide that.

In answer to your question, I suspect Flash was installable for 6.06 during 2006, and corporate users could setup Firefox with Flash, and it would work fine, which is what the corp environment wants. In short, the term "LTS" means "install, deploy and don't worry too much about it for 3 years". 8.04 is no different in this respect. The other twice-yearly releases can't promise that kind of piece of mind, and should really be upgraded as the newer releases roll round.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dang... Everyone already posted the answer :(

But, yeah, LTS has a longer release cycle for business stability, and 3rd party vendors aren't required to offer the same backwards compatibility. You would be classified as a "home user", and would want the current stuff. So throw out that old 6.04 CD, replace it with 8.04 LTS (if LTS is your thing, which it sounds like it is not what you want) or download the current 8.10 released today, I believe.

(Y)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There's little point in using 6.06 LTS when 8.04 LTS is now available. Of course, for the average end user, I always recommend the latest, which would be 8.10, just released today.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

By LTS, it means that they support it with security etc upgrades until that date.

Flash is made by Adobe, and they're under no obligation to support older versions of Ubuntu. If there is a security update for a supported version of flash on 6.06, it will probably be in the repo.

To the average user, no, the LTS version is just another release. The average user is likely to upgrade to the next version when it arrives.

To corporate users LTS means that it can be deployed and setup safe in the knowledge that there will be fixes and security updates for the next 3 years. This doesn't necessarily mean that apps like Firefox will be updated to the latest version, or indeed plugins like Flash. In a corporate environment, you need reliabilty. The latest software versions don't always provide that.

In answer to your question, I suspect Flash was installable for 6.06 during 2006, and corporate users could setup Firefox with Flash, and it would work fine, which is what the corp environment wants. In short, the term "LTS" means "install, deploy and don't worry too much about it for 3 years". 8.04 is no different in this respect. The other twice-yearly releases can't promise that kind of piece of mind, and should really be upgraded as the newer releases roll round.

Dang... Everyone already posted the answer :(

But, yeah, LTS has a longer release cycle for business stability, and 3rd party vendors aren't required to offer the same backwards compatibility.

That?s unfortunate. I assumed that Canonical was attempting to give users a stable home desktop in LTS releases(not having to update every 6 months), and as a consequence, give developers a solid platform to release on. Some of what Shuttleworth said at the release and some of the hype that went along with it may have given me this impression, and it seemed like a really good thing for the Linux community.

As far as updating, I already have, that?s just the CD I have up at college.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.