Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Released

markybob writes "Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 beta has been released. It features GNOME 2.22 and uses Linux kernel 2.6.24. Furthermore, it uses Firefox 3 beta 4, and PulseAudio is enabled by default. To ease the transition of Windows users, it includes Wubi, which allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation."

Sweet Stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Just installed the amd64 version on my quad core box. I am really liking the goodies -

Startup is quicker than previous version on the same hardware. Filesystems are now mounted with 'realtime' flag out-of-box - yay for even more speed!
I was able to install it inside of Windows (Vista x64) without any performance loss using the Wubi installer - Ubuntu entry appeared in Windows boot loader and I did not had to partition my NTFS formatted disks - you can try and see how it works without losing data or even disk space when you am done trying it. Cool.

Firefox 3 - my favorite browser is bundled and integrated - can't ask for more!

Got to try KVM /virtio - KVM is something that never worked well for me.

Re:WUBI?

[SpydeZ]

If you *must* run windows for company apps, then Wubi probably isn't for you. It's more of a dual-boot type thing, cept it uses a file on your windows partition as it's 'hard drive'.

You might want to try out andLinux [andlinux.org]. It's a full on linux that integrates seamlessly inside of windows.

Personally, dual-booting is kind of a drag because of the constant reboots to get into Windows to do that one Windows-only thing, so I like cygwin or andLinux over Wubi.

PulseAudio

[quanticle]

How's the PulseAudio decision working out so far? I've run into lots of PulseAudio problems in Fedora (which enabled it by default in Fedora 8), so its a little bit surprising that Ubuntu has decided to enable PulseAudio by default. Personally, I don't think PulseAudio is yet ready for mainstream use, so I'm wondering what the justification for this decision was.

KDE4

[spikenerd]

I installed Kubuntu beta with KDE4. Almost everything just worked.

Had a tiny issue with KNetworkManager. It only wanted to recognize one network card at a time. I had to manually edit /etc/network/interfaces to fix it. That's the only old-style hackery I had to do. Did everything else via the GUI.

Now it's functioning as a gateway, interfaces with Windows machines on my home network via samba, set up apache and all that stuff. KDE4 is a bit tough to customize. The features are pretty sparse. I can't tell my clock to display seconds, it's really inconvenient to move icons around on the taskbar--gotta go through many menues, etc., but I suppose this will get better with time.

Summary: KDE4 isn't done, but it looks like it will be nice. Almost everything just works.

Problems with Wine by default

[TheBlunderbuss]

Compiz/Beryl takes away OpenGL resources, and pulseaudio doesn't work right with ALSA, let alone the ALSA Wine driver.
I'll be spending so much more time telling people to turn that stuff off.

Oh thank you so much, Ubuntu team!

Re:WUBI?

[MyDixieWrecked]

A friend of mine actually used Wubi a couple days ago- it was the first I'd heard of it.

Installation went without a hitch. It basically created a couple of disk-image type files on his C: partition and Ubuntu boots from that.

It's pretty neat because when you look at the output from the 'df' command, your drives aren't mounting from /dev, but rather /media/wubi

Re:** How does this compare with VMWare server per

[scuba_steve_1]

My empirical evidence shows otherwise. That may be due to a range of factors...not the least of which is the fact that the VM creates a hardware architecture that is more generic and thus, you may not have access to optimized drivers for your specific hardware (e.g., graphics card). The fact that an entire windows stack is running underneath the VMWare server application also cannot be understated, however, regardless of how efficient the VMWare Server application is. Keep in mind, I am talking about (the free) VMWare server...and not VMWare ESX.

BTW, this isn't just theoretical for me. I have numerous VMWare Server installs.

One example, I have Ubuntu 7.10 installed on two devices at home:

1) Installed as the actual OS on a 5 year-old Compaq laptop with 512 MB of RAM (and it was a budget laptop the day that I bought it new)

2) Installed in VMWare on a intel-based quad core Q6600 with 4GB of RAM, an 8800GT GPU, and a 10k Raptor Hard Drive...running XP SP2 as the base OS.

The compaq laptop Ubuntu performance absolutely SMOKES Ubuntu running in VMWare in the Q6600...even when the Q6600-based PC is running nothing beyond anti-virus, anti-spyware, and other lighter weight services. I don't have CPU mark tests, so I apologize for throwing out an assessment without objective measures to base it...but I stand by it. I will try to run some tests to isolate the GPU factor however, since I really believe that is a large part of the issue. Native graphic drivers are just plain better.

Dual monitors in Hardy

[SEMW]

Xorg 7.3 - the main advantage should be easier configuration, especially in multi-monitor setups. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say. But it can only be better than what we have now.

Having had a rather bad time trying to get dual monitors set up in Gutsy, I've just tried the new screen applet (using the vanilla auto-configured xorg.conf).

Looked pretty good at first; it shows the two monitors side by side, showing the one I hadn't been using with a screen resolution set to 'off'. I set that to 1152x864, and pressed 'apply': Lo and behold, it turned on and showed my desktop at that resolution -- except that the monitor I had been using before was now set to 'off'. I used the applet to turn that monitor on, it did so -- and turned my secondary monitor back off.

The old 'Screens and Graphics' manager is still installed, only it's been moved over to the 'applications' menu for some reason. It still works identically to how it worked in Gutsy. By which I mean: not at all.

Not impressed.

Re:WUBI?

[Oldstench]

I understand that this is not the forum for this, but this intrigued me. I would love to dual boot between Linux and Windows, but don't want to lose everything that I already have on my Windows box. Would it be possible for me to Ghost my existing Windows machine, format and create the dual-boot, and then reimage what I had to my new Windows partition? I only wonder because I don't know how well Ghost would handle the disk size changes.

Upgrade to 7.10 was broken, is this better?

[spitzak]

Rather annoyed at Ubuntu. It worked great on my Dell Precision M90 laptop in 6.? (whatever the one before this was). I upgraded to 7.10 and the sound, wireless, and suspend all broke.

I managed to fix them by doing a lot of Google and package installation (here is what worked: the sound required the installation of something like "ubuntu_backports". The wireless (an Intel chip) required the installation of the i386 drivers (as opposed to the "generic" drivers used by the non-default version of the kernel). The suspend required installation of something called "ps_suspend" though I tried a lot of scary-looking other suggestions before this worked, with the annoying fact that I had to reboot every time a test failed. I'm quite certain that most people would not have figured out or tried any of these. (hint for googling: use the animal name, ie "gutsy")

Normally you can blame lack of hardware manufacturer support and/or lack of resources to test things, but not when it worked in the previous version AND the system can be fixed to work in the new version.

From my Google searching it sounds like a lot of people complained about the lack of such quality compared to the previous Ubuntu.

Any word on whether I can expect the same, better, or worse from this new version?

Re:WUBI?

[dotancohen]

I second VirtualBox. VMWare ran Solidworks like a dog, but Virtualbox runs it perfectly.

Windows and Linux..

[Pyrophor]

I never took the time to do a dual boot. Maybe to me it is too much hassle restarting to get into another machine. If you have your working computer (Ubuntu for me..) and your coding computer or gaming (Windows).. Go with the multiple computer set up I think. Synergy is the way to go. I can have my yahoo widgets in Windows, code in VB, and do everything else in Linux and it is just like have running a computer with dual monitors. XP and Ubuntu Gusty make a good combo. I wonder what improvements Hardy will add to the mix? - AHA! Proof that we can truly have our cake and eat it! Excellent!

The Real Question Is.....

[RobDude]

Will Ubuntu 8.04 support my wireless usb network adapter? It's a LinkSys WUSB300N.

And by 'support' I mean, install Ubuntu and have it work. Not edit this, hack that, download the windows driver, run this emulator, reconfigure this thingamabob and so on and so forth. And by 'support' I mean, be able to use it - you know, not just be able to go online but be able to encrypt data using WEP or any of the other methods available to me in Windows.

Not trying to be a jerk or anything; but to me this is the ultimate test for Linux. When it works with the hardware I already own.

Of course, fanboys will tell me that everything already does work (or so they've been claiming for years now). In Ubuntu 7 my wireless adapter didn't work. Rumors of people getting it to work using ndiswrap (provided you use the right version of ndiswrap and edit/change a million different settings and then, WEP didn't work).

If it DOES work, on a fresh install; I'd actually like to reinstall Ubuntu.

Re:WUBI?

[Sczi]

That will work fine, but there are ways to shoot yourself in the foot, and there is an extra step in there at you don't need. But as long as your ghost backup is good, then the worst that could happen is you might need to reapply the image and then do whatever you need to do like defrag or whatever, take another image, and then try again. And for future reference, applying a ghost image to a smaller partition than you took it from will work fine most of the time, and the times it won't work is because of something else.

But like I said you don't need to take an image and then reapply it. The more direct approach is to defrag so that you get a big contiguous block of space at the end of the drive, shrink the Windows partition (Vista can shrink the C: while windows is running, otherwise find a util), and then make a new partition at the end for whatever.

Either way, take a good ghost image first. Ghost is the greatest thing since jarred cheese.

VOIP Clients Need Love under pulseaudio on Ubuntu

[j0ebaker]

The move to pulseaudio as the default sound systems is welcomed.  It's mastry of emulating OSS, ALSA and ESound are simply awesome and supposedly these are emulated more efficiently than the origtional competing sound systems.
The problem is that there is an alsa compatibility library that needs to be fixed ASAP before this distribution gets released.

To see the breakage just run the VoIP client named Ekiga and get into it's audio wizard.  It just hangs there.

I've been studying long and hard to learn Asterisk and I'll be damned if I will run a distribution that can't provide audio to SIP client software on my laptop.

https://answers.launchpad.net/alsa-plugins/+question/27568

I was an early adopter of pulseaudio on my 7.10 laptop and have suffered not being able to run voip clients such as:
  X-Lite
  iaxcomm
  Ekiga
  Twinkle
  Kphone

I really like Ubuntu, but I'm concerned they may loose significant market share if they don't resolve this matter FAST in the beta stages of 8.04.

-Joe Baker
GPG Key ID DDEC0260

Re:WUBI?

[ShieldW0lf]

Use VMWare. You can use tools from VMWares site to convert your existing Windows installation to a virtual machine, then install VMWare server on Ubuntu using the GUI, grab a license key for free from VMWares site, and fire up your newly created virtual machine. Then you shouldn't lose anything, and you can run them both simultaneously.

Re:Already installed

[cuby]

well... I posted a new idea about importing existing ubuntu accounts. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5320/ [ubuntu.com]
let's see if it rises some interest.