Ce centième numéro de notre magazine favorite (hourra!) pourrait être une bonne occasion pour regarder en arrière et se souvenir comment était la distribution Ubuntu dans sa forme originale, et comment elle se compare aux versions plus modernes. Le meilleur point de départ est probablement la première version publique, Ubuntu Warty Warthog connue aussi comme 4.10 puisqu'elle fut publiée au mois d'octobre 2004. A Ubuntu beaucoup changé depuis ? Quels logiciels étaient inclus, et sur quel type de matériel pouvait-on l'exécuter ? Pourrait-on encore l'utiliser sur un ordinateur moderne ? Voici quelques-unes de questions que nous aimerions traiter au long des pages suivantes.

*Get it! The first nice bit of news that I came across when researching Warty is that it is still available, and directly from the original source. Just head over to the “old-releases” server at Ubuntu, and you can pick up the CD images: http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/4.10/ *

La première bonne nouvelle que j'ai rencontrée lors de mes investigations sur Warty fut le fait qu'elle est toujours disponible, et ce directement depuis la source originale. Dirigez-vous tout simplement vers le serveur « old-releases » d'Ubuntu, et vous pourrez télé-charger les images CD à l'adresse suivante:

http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/4.10/

*This is a bit of a surprise, since not many suppliers even of commercial applications would make an eleven-year-old piece of software still available on their servers. My hat's off to Canonical for this one. We are faced with a choice of three different architectures: Intel 32-bit (i386), Intel/AMD 64-bit (amd64) and PowerPC. If I remember correctly, there were not that many 64-bit computers in common use as desktops -and even less in laptops- back in 2004; the 64-bit processors existed, but were mostly found in Xeon servers and high-end gaming rigs. As for the PowerPc version, interestingly enough some of the first tests were done on Apple's G3 Macbooks, with commentators saying the keyboard worked “out of the box”. Suffice it to say we get a fair choice of hardware architectures supported, actually much the same that are supported even today.*

Ceci constitue une petite surprise, puisqu'il existe peu de fournisseurs même de logiciels commerciaux qui mettent à disposition une application d'il y a onze ans sur leurs serveurs. Mes félicitations à Canonical pour ce faire.

Nous nous trouvons devant un choix de trois architectures matérielles : Intel de 32 bits (i386), Intel/AMD de 64 bits (amd64) et PowerPC. Si je me souviens correctement, en 2004 il ne se trouvait guère d'ordinateurs de 64 bits en usage courant comme ordinateurs de bureau - et encore moins comme portables ; les processeurs sur 64 bits existaient bien, mais se trouvaient surtout dans de serveurs équipés de Xeon ou des ordinateurs pour jeux haut-de-gamme. Quant à la version PowerPC, il est intéressant de noter que certains des premiers tests ont été fait sur des Apple Macbook G3, et que selon les commentaires des essayeurs les claviers ont tout-de-suite marché correctement. Disons seulement que l'offre d'architectures supportées est suffisante, semblable en tout cas à celle que l'on trouve même aujourd'hui.

*However, it should be noted that most of these CDs are installation CD, not Live CDs to boot a working environment from. The only choice for a Live CD is the 32-bit Intel architecture, and this Live CD does not contain the installation program. So back in Warty's day, we needed to use what is now called “alternative CD” to make a permanent install to our hard drive. Perhaps space was a limitation here; the i386 Live CD is already very close to the 650 MByte size constraint on early CD-ROMs, so looking at the sizes of the other images available we can conjecture providing a Live CD for other architectures would have resulted in images above that size. Any way, I chose to download the i386 images both for the Live CD and for the installation disk.*

Mais il faut noter que la plupart de ces images de CD correspondent à des CDs d'installation, et non des Live CD à partir desquels on puisse mettre en route un environnement de travail. Le seul choix de Live CD est pour l'architecture Intel 32 bits, et cet image ne contient pas de logiciel d'installation. A l'époque de Warty, donc, on devait utiliser ce qui correspond à l'actuel « alternative CD » pour effectuer l'installation définitive sur disque dur. Il est possible que la manque de place ait constitué une limitation ; le Live CD pour i386 est déjà assez près de la limite de 650 MO des CDs de l'époque, et à la vue des tailles des autres images nous pouvons conjecturer que la création d'un Live CD pour les autres architectures aurait fini par produire des images de CD supérieurs à la taille maximale.

En tout état de cause, j'ai décidé de télé-charger les images i386 tant Live CD comme pour l'installation.

*Running in a virtual machine The first step was to test the images downloaded within a virtual environment. In this case, I used Virtualbox 4.3 under Linux Mint 17.1 on my work machine. The Live CD booted straight up at the first try, with a boot-loader screen that is -in my honest opinion- rather more informative that current offerings. Though I could understand that the perhaps excessive information may be a tad off-putting for the casual user. Soon, there I was staring at the brown desktop from many days back. More on that later, for the time being let's just say that the Live CD works in a virtual machine with little changes from a modern GNOME 2 desktop – except for the perhaps untidy ramdisk icon.*

Le premier pas fut de tester les images télé-chargées dans un environnement virtuel. Dans ce cas, j'ai utilisé Virtualbox 4.3 sous Linux Mint 17.1 sur ma machine de travail. Le Live CD s'est mis en route de suite au premier essai, avec un écran boot qui -à mon avis, tout de moins- donne davantage d'information que les versions plus actuelles. Bien que je puisse aussi comprendre que trop d'information puisse être incommode pour l'utilisateur novice.

Je me suis rapidement trouvé devant le bureau marron d'antan.

J'en parlerai plus un peu plus en avant, pour le moment disons seulement que le Live CD marche dans un environnement virtuel avec peu de différences en comparaison avec un bureau GNOME 2 moderne – sauf pour une icône ramdisk que peut faire désordre.

*The second test was using the installation disk to try to install the system on the hard drive. This one also booted up rather quickly, and the installation program took over. In Warty, the installer was simply the ncurses-based Debian installer, with little adaptation to Ubuntu. The program started by giving us a choice of language, though options are limited to the 40-or-so choices given by Debian. Ubuntu's later versions have an even more comprehensive offering. With this installer, the process is spread over two phases. Disks are partitioned in the first, and general system configuration is done. The machine is then rebooted. Once running again, user creation is performed during the second phase – i.e. after rebooting. This is one area where more modern versions of Ubuntu have accustomed us to a more streamlined process – while Debian has perhaps stagnated a little, with less cosmetic changes since 2004. Even though this text-based installer is a breeze to navigate in for experienced users, perhaps some of the messages are not clear for the novice, for instance when setting up disk partitions.*

Le deuxième test effectué fut avec le disque d'installation, pour essayer d'installer le système sur le disque dur. Cette image s'est mise en route rapidement aussi, et le programme d'installation a pris le contrôle. Sous Warty, l'installeur est en fait tout simplement l'installeur Debian basé sur ncurses, avec peu d'adaptation à Ubuntu. Le programme a commencé par donner un choix de langue, bien que les options se limitent à la même petite quarantaine de langues d'origine Debian. Les versions suivantes d'Ubuntu offre un choix encore plus large.

Avec cet installateur, le processus a lieu sur deux étapes. Dans le premier les partitions de disque sont créées, et la configuration générale du système est faite. La machine est alors arrêtée et remise en route. Une fois nouvellement en marche, la création des utilisateurs prend place pendant la deuxième phase – soit après la remise en marche. Voici un point sur lequel les versions plus récentes d'Ubuntu nous ont habitués à une procédure plus propre - quoique Debian est possiblement resté sur place, avec peu de changements depuis 2004. Bien que cet installateur a base de texte est facile à naviguer pour des utilisateurs avec un peu d'expérience, il est possible que certains messages ne soient pas suffisamment clairs pour les novices, par exemple lors de la mise en place des partitions disque.

*Speaking of disk partitioning, the first time I booted from the installation disk I was unable to create any partitions. The installer suggested doing manual partitioning – which I chose - which lead me to automatic partitioning – which abandoned and brought me back to manual – etc. That was when I remembered that SATA connections between the hard drives and motherboards were not in widespread use back in 2004, since the technology had just appeared in 2003. I checked the settings on the virtual machine, and -sure enough- I had left the default configuration on and the virtual hard drive was controlled through SATA emulation. Once this was changed and the virtual hard drive was connected through a more traditional IDE, installation proceeded smoothly. Once the machine had rebooted, I created the primary user and the desktop came up as usual. The bit to take back home is that Warty simply does not support SATA drives – which will have its importance in the next section.*

À propos des partitions disque, la première fois que j'ai mis en route le disque d'installation j'ai été incapable de créer aucune partition. L'installeur suggérait de créer les partitions manuellement -ce que j'ai choisi-, processus qui m'a ramené sur les partitions automatiques, ce qui a encore abandonné et m'a remis sur les partitions manuelles, etc.

C'est à ce moment-là que je me suis souvenu que les connections SATA entre disques durs et cartes mères n'étaient pas encore en usage courant en 2004, puisque cette technologie venait tout juste d'apparaître en 2003. J'ai contrôlé la configuration de la machine virtuelle, et en effet j'avais laissé en place l'option par défaut et le disque dur était connecté au moyen de l'émulation de connection SATA.

Une fois basculé la connection du disque dur vers une IDE traditionnelle, l'installation a pu prendre lieu sans heurts. Une fois que la machine s'est remise en route, j'ai créé l'utilisateur principal et le bureau est apparu comme d'habitude. Le fait à se rappeler est que Warty tout simplement ne supporte pas les disques durs SATA – ce qui aura son importance dans la section suivante.

*Meanwhile, I wanted to see if the package repositories for Warty were still on-line. As I had suspected, there they were on the Old-releases server. All versions that have since been deprecated are catered for, from Warty up to Saucy (Saucy Salamander a.k.a. 13.10). http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu Although the “aptitude update” and “aptitude upgrade” commands worked flawlessly, there was no software that needed upgrading. It would seem Warty did not see any updates – or, if they did, the updates did not make it into the archive copy of the repositories. This contrasts a bit with current versions, that often have updated software packages available very little time after release to the public.*

Pendant ce temps, je voulais voir si les répositoires de paquets pour Warty étaient toujours en ligne. Comme je me doutais, elles étaient bien présentes sur le serveur Old-releases. Toutes les versions actuellement hors support y sont servies encore, depuis Warty jusqu'à Saucy (Saucy Salamander, soit la version 13.10).

http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

Bien que les commandes « aptitude update » et « aptitude upgrade » se soient tout-à-fait bien comportées, il n'existait pas de logiciels qui puissent être mis à jour. Il semblerait donc que Warty n'aient pas eu droit à des mises à jour – ou, si elles sont bien apparues, qu'elles ne soient pas arrivées sur la copie d'archive des répositoires. Cette situation contraste un peu avec celle des versions plus récentes, qui ont souvent vu des paquets de logiciels mis à jour apparaître très peu de temps après leur publication initiale.

Running on bare metal

Once I was satisfied Warty still worked on a virtual machine, I started looking for physical hardware I could run it on. As stated above, any computers with the hard drive connected through a SATA bus couldn't have Warty installed permanently on them, and those ever so common with SATA optical drives could not even boot off the Live CD.

As I soon discovered, neither could I boot off a USB stick. An image created with the netbootin utility program did manage to load both kernel and initrd image, but the kernel was then incapable of mounting the CD-ROM filesystem image on the USB stick. So options were quite reduced; in essence, I needed a computer with a hard drive and a CD, both connected using IDE. In the end, I resurrected a Benq Joybook R31E built in year 2005 off the junk pile. This is a laptop that has been configured with an Intel Centrino M processor, 640 MBytes of RAM and a 60 GByte IDE hard drive. It may be interesting to note it is also quite capable of running Xubuntu 14.10 if needed.

I still had some actual blank CDs left from way back when, and at least one computer with a CD/DVD burner. Once the CD images had been burned to physical media, testing could commence.

The Live CD started up correctly, the live system was responsive, and programs worked as they should. There is nothing special to report on here, except perhaps for the amount of RAM used: just 91.7 MBytes. This is certainly a welcome contrast with modern desktop managers. You will not need a Gigabyte of RAM just to test Warty.

As for the installer CD, the installation process also worked correctly – until it was time to install the GRUB boot loader. It then failed miserably, and the accompanying message was unclear as to the motive:

I then re-tried installing, this time with a different disk partitioning scheme. I avoided the very first tracks, under the assumption that they may have gotten a hammering earlier on in their lives. This seemed to help a tad, as GRUB was -supposedly- installed with no error messages on screen. But the computer never got to reboot, just going back into BIOS time and again.

So there ended my efforts of installing Warty on a physical machine. It certainly seems more finicky than more recent versions of Ubuntu. As stated above, Xubuntu 14.10 has had zero problems with installing and running on this particular piece of equipment.

Using the desktop environment

With Warty Warthog comes a standard complement of “major” software:

an image editor, Gimp version 2.0 a productivity suite, OpenOffice version 1.1 a web browser, Firefox version 0.9.3

Gimp works well in both the virtual environment and booting off the Live CD. It is certainly usable to work on images as long as the physical hardware is up to the task (memory may be a concern). Although there have been some changes in comparison with today's version 2.8, they tend to consist mostly of enhancements and features getting added – and of some changes in the placement of tools within the user environment that I am perhaps less fond of. Perhaps the biggest gripe I have against today's version of GIMP 2.8 is that Warty's version 2.0 did not overly insist on using GIMP's very own file format, but was perfectly happy with JPEG or PNG or whatever. A step backwards, in my personal opinion.

OpenOffice: also usable. Both OpenOffice and GIMP are rather fast, even in a virtual environment. The tool bars and so are mostly in the same places, and everything works in the way a modern user would expect. This just goes to say that the teams at OpenOffice and later LibreOffice have not gone on changing things just for the sake of change. Instead, they have concentrated on making the internals of the software suite even better, for example adding Word docx file support and making presentations more rich.

With Firefox and web browsing in general I have not that much luck. No Flash is available, for starters, and not even CSS stylesheets are supported. Google's products do work (mail, Drive, Calendar…), in a compatibility mode of sorts. No so for Youtube.

The fact that some certification authorities in widespread use nowadays did not even exist back in 2004 does not help. For example, FCM's page comes up, but the inclusion of a live link to Twitter causes grief. Back in 2004, Symantec had not yet jumped on the Class 3 web server certificate (EV or Extended Validation certificate) bandwagon, so the corresponding Certification Authority public certificate was naturally enough not included in the browsers' list of trusted signing certificates.

IPv6 addresses were not yet supported by programs accessing the Internet such as wget or Firefox, though the operating system itself (kernel and utility programs) was well up to it.

A solution that came to mind was upgrading Firefox with a more modern version. However, Warty still depends on earlier versions of the main GNU standard C++ library (version 5), while Firefox depends on the later version 6. It has been available in GCC (GNU C Compiler) version 3.4.0 since April 2004, but was not used to build Warty. So no luck with web browsing in the modern world, which is perhaps the most important defect that precludes from using Warty in an actual work environment today.

As for additional hardware, there is naturally much less support in Warty for USB-connected peripherals such as cameras and printers than in recent releases. This is perhaps understandable, since the GNU/Linux operating system was at that time much less used in a desktop user-oriented environment than it is now. The increase in Linux's adoption has made drivers for domestic and small-work environment peripherals much more ubiquitous than before – and this is thanks, among other factors, to Ubuntu itself and its positive effect on non-geeks' adoption of the system.

USB sticks are supported, more or less. That is to say, they are detected IF formatted with a VFAT (Windows 32-bit) filesystem, and IF the flash drive is formatted directly as a file system, without using partitions. Support is more flaky than today; not every insertion is correctly detected and mounted. Due to hardware constraints, I have not been able to run USB 3 with Warty. It should work in principle, though perhaps only in USB 2 mode.

As for screen drivers, Warty still relies on the very old X configuration files – that used to be edited manually. In Warty, some X server detection is performed automatically, but users are at times requested to choose the correct screen resolution. No 16:9 proportioned modes are offered. Modern machines will want to use the Vesa screen server, which will make a graphical screen possible but not in an optimal fashion. Do not depend on hardware acceleration ever working with these drivers.

The availability of a WiFi connection is also much of a hit-and-miss proposition. If you are lucky enough to have a WiFi card that is supported by Warty, then it may have an older chipset that will not connect to modern access points that support only 802.11g or 802.11n, and may also present difficulties with WPA encryption that is practically mandatory in modern networking.

Conclusions

This trip back in time made me realize three things. The first is that -despite the incident with Unity- there is actually quite a lot of coherence between Ubuntu versions all along the now eleven-year-long timeline of the distribution. The main objectives -such as ease of use for most users- have not really changed. A large offering catering for the non-English-speaking users has been there since day 1, and has only been improved over time.

The second point is that some things have changed on the hardware side. And, although GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu have at times lent a hand towards hardware support, at the end of the day both the distributions and the user are tributaries to one main project: the Linux kernel itself. To this I would add the various device drivers available as source code, and the utilities needed to use them and for specific hardware-related tasks (such as ntfs-3g to use Windows' NTFS filesystem). Without these, the Ubuntu distribution could not have advanced with the times as it has until today.

Finally, I also came to realize our dependency on the Internet. This may seem a platitude, but consider: a US $150 Chromebook can be considered a viable option to work with (via Google Drive or Microsoft Office 365) or for entertainment. But a $1000+ computer without a viable Web browser capable of handling JavaScript, Flash and CSS will not. We depend on access to Web services to the point that having a modern browser is something of a game maker or breaker.

In retrospect, most of the ways in which Warty could be a found lacking for the modern world had been addressed and solved, quite quickly, by Canonical and the GNU/Linux ecosystem as a whole. To take an example, Karmic Koala (9.10) had the USB stick problem entirely solved. A Karmic desktop can be installed directly from USB, and once installed, can recognize and work with USBs in different formats. Speaking of formats, the upgraded ext4 filesystem was available in 2009. Wifi support had been much improved in the five years since Warty, and the C library also went up to version 6.

This means that even though Karmic still used the version 3 series of the Firefox browser, a more modern browser can easily be downloaded from the Mozilla web page and used as a direct replacement. Note the Firefox version number and the live WiFi signal indicator in the following screen capture. Also note that Youtube works through HTML 5, without installing supplementary Flash software.

It shows us how much Ubuntu had evolved by 2009, in aspects that directly impact the user experience. Karmic could eventually still be used as a daily driver if you are not too worried about security or being on the bleeding edge of technology. Warty could not.

Author biography: Alan teaches computer science at Escola Andorrana de Batxillerat (high-school). He has previously given GNU/Linux courses at the University of Andorra and taught GNU/Linux systems administration at the Open University of Catalunya (UOC).

Biographie de l'auteur: Alan enseigne l'informatique à la Escola Andorrana de Batxillerat. Il a donné des cours de GNU/Linux à l'Université d'Andorre et avait enseigné l'administration des systèmes GNU/Linux à l'Université ouverte de Catalogne (UOC).