Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat - is it yaVDR's cup of tea?
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11. October 2010
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yaVDR
You have most likely heard the good news already: Ubuntu 10.10 was released yesterday!
As we are all big Ubuntu fans, we are very happy to have a fresh new release to play with on our development PCs. But how does the "Maverick Meerkat" change the game for yaVDR? Let's look at this question from two angles: "yaVDR - the distro" and "yaVDR - the provider of easily installable VDR packages for Ubuntu".
The distro sticks to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
yaVDR 0.2, our currently latest release from June 2010, is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. We are working hard on our next release that will be called yaVDR 0.3: It will still be based on 10.04. This means that users of yaVDR 0.2 will be able to update to yaVDR 0.3 just via package updates. There will be no need to install yaVDR 0.3 from scratch using the ISO image if you already have yaVDR 0.2 running.
So, why do we ignore the Meerkat? Firstly, because we are nearly done with yaVDR 0.3: We started to work on it a few months ago. Secondly, we don't see enough benefit that would justify the amount of work to move to Ubuntu 10.10. All necessary packages that contain interesting updates can be downported by us and offered in our PPAs (for example Nvidia driver updates). If necessary, we could offer a downported kernel 2.6.35 (it seems that it will be backported upstream anyway). But since we offer up-to-date DVB drivers through our DKMS packages, offering the new kernel doesn't really seem to be mandatory at this time.
The yaVDR distro is quite close to an Ubuntu minimal installation and many of the new features of Ubuntu 10.10 that involve Gnome or KDE wouldn't be noticable in yaVDR anyway.
We don't see any disadvantages in sticking to Ubuntu 10.04 as a base for yaVDR 0.3. Especially, as 10.04 is a long time supported release (LTS), we don't have to worry about a short upstream update period: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be supported for three long years by Canonical.
Maverick VDR packages: Surely, but not today
The yaVDR distro is based on the VDR packages we maintain in our Launchpad PPAs. Launchpad gives us the freedom to build packages for different Ubuntu releases. So, yes, you can expect us to provide Maverick VDR packages one day in our PPAs. But right now, we are working hard on getting yaVDR 0.3 out of the door. And so there will be no time at all to work on Maverick packages before we will have released yaVDR 0.3. Thank you for your understanding!
We will tell you more about upcoming yaVDR 0.3s exciting features during the following days on this blog. Stay tuned! ;-)
24. February 2011
Currently, we focus on updating Lucid packages for yaVDR 0.3 and besides that we are also working on Natty packages for future yaVDR releases. So we will most likely skip Maverik and it is highly unlikely that we will offer Maverick packages in our yaVDR repositories.
29. January 2011
Thanks for the tip. The software in that repository works for me so I'll continue to use it until the official yaVDR packages become available.
28. January 2011
There is a 3rd party repository:
Wellknown VDR-Portal user "mahlzeit" has started a spin-off repository of Maverick VDR packages based on yaVDR testing packages:
www.1elf.de/technik/digitaler-videorekorder/yavdr-vdr-1716-fuer-ubuntu-maverick-meerkat.html
This is worth a try, but it is not an official yaVDR repo.
hepi
28. January 2011
Is there any likelihood of Maverick VDR packages becoming available in yaVDR PPA's anytime soon?
I appreciate this is not the teams top priority but I think there are quite a few people out there who would love to use yaVDR vdr packages on Maverick.
15. October 2010
I'm excited and looking forward to the new release 0.3 !!!
But everything would be perfect if there was also the 64bit version of the distro.
14. October 2010
I cant wait for the yavdr 0.3 release day!
I have a request please: Can you add a pdf reader or viewer into the yavdr 0.3 addons? Thanks alot.