Earlier today, Steve Langasek reminded us that Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) reaches its end of support on the desktop next week (July 14, 2009). I think it's time for a little nostalgia!
As the maintainer of Ubuntu's KVM package, I spend quite a bit of my time regression testing our virtualization stack (kvm, qemu, libvirt, virt-manager, etc). In doing so, I have constructed a massive archive of virtual machine images.
About 6 months ago, Jamie Strandboge and I kicked around the idea of creating a series of "Linux museums", honoring our heritage by providing download-able virtual appliance images that could run under KVM. Jamie is currently working on something like this for Debian's releases.
I'm pleased to introduce my contribution...The Ubuntu Museum! Here, you can find:
- screenshots (png) of each Ubuntu desktop release
- screencasts (mpeg) of each Ubuntu boot and shutdown sequence
- virtual machine images (bzip2, qcow2) of each retired Ubuntu desktop release
- default i386 desktop installations
- with all packages updated to their final resting state
- the username and password are both "ubuntu"
Since I started using Ubuntu with the Breezy release, I found it quite educational to play around with Warty and Hoary--a bit of Ubuntu history I was missing. It is interesting to see the evolution of the artwork and color schemes. I find some strange satisfaction hitting a few old, memorable bugs and then thinking "boy am I glad we fixed that!" It is also pretty cool to see how much we've improved startup and shutdown times.
I recently attended an excellent presentation by Colin Watson on the history of the Debian and Ubuntu installers. He made the point that it's important to know where we've been, when we're trying to figure out where we're going.
Hopefully some of you will enjoy this trip down memory lane and perhaps learn something too!
:-Dustin
Hi!
ReplyDeleteAre you aware of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Archives?
Would you be willing to move the content over there, or should we perhaps replace that section with a pointer the museum?
Hi thorwil-
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link, I was not aware of that. I'll gladly link to it. However, I don't think I can move most of the content over there. I don't think the wiki is capable of hosting 6GB+ of virtual machine images and screencasts.
:-Dustin
Thats pretty cool Dustin, I'm off to have a tinker with the VMIs. Still think Hardy's desktop was the best, Intrepid's looks like a coffee cup ring or a zombie depending on distance :-)
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting, I was going to do this with my personal website as well.
ReplyDeleteI also make screen shots for Wikipedia a while back, including GDM and Usplash (which is also interesting to look at).
Feel free to use them as I'd love to add to this museum (and of course, because I don't own them)!
They were created with VMware at the time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Altonbr/My_Uploads