Like everyone these days, I live in a range of widespread cultures. As well as this one, my far flung family, work and a number of others I have been heavily involved in various parts of the computing community for many decades. So there are always interesting shock effects when one culture run into another.
So it was when I mentioned to my partner that the bionic beaver was nearly here last month. Her immediate response was of disdain and outrage. I was astonished, until I started to think about it in her context… Then it did start sounding a tad offensive.
But for me it was just progression in naming convention for the Ubuntu Linux for the last 20+ releases. They get released in April (.04) and October (.10) and the year is the first number of the release. So this release is 18.04. They are given animal name, usually from the next letter in the alphabet. In this case Beaver for B. And a adjective (?) with the same letter.
All of which winds up a being a memorable identification of exactly what you are talking about when discussions arise about the system. See below for the list.. The open source community and especially the Linux community are known for their quirkiness of names and pretty strict versioning control. Because some stuff works well and some releases need to be avoided – you need accuracy. So names are memorable without having strange marketing crap.
After all who needs to know any else about Microsoft Vista other than it was generally a crap release that should be avoided, and Microsoft reverted to numbers are that experiment in damaging their brand 🙂
Every 4th release is a LTS – Long Term Support, which is why I was interested. The Standard currently runs on LTS editions, currently on Xenial Xerus – the last LTS at 16.04. Bionic Beaver is the new LTS so I will upgrade to The Standard’s servers to after I get back from Singapore in (hopefully) early June. Upgrading remotelyis certainly possible. But I don’t really want to call on favours to provide hands on site if anything fails (The Standard is a very very low-budget organisation).
In the meantime I’d better finish upgrading my laptop and some virtual machines on my linux laptop from Artful Aardvark to the Bionic Beaver 🙂
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