Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released 744
palegray.net writes "The latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released. Offering numerous enhancements for both desktop and server environments, this release includes notable features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubuntu One 'personal cloud,' and Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Please be sure to use a release mirror close to your geographic location to help reduce the stress on Ubuntu's primary servers; using BitTorrent for downloads can help alleviate the load even more. If your organization has adequate network and server resources, please consider hosting a mirror as well."
It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
Re:How to get Ubuntu 9? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you'll be better off with a complete reinstall. Especially if you have /home on a separate partition.
It's not released yet?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean seriously, how hard is it to go look at http://www.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com] to check?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
The first generation of netbooks ran linux. Just about everything after that ran windows. Sounds like linux will miss the bus.
Re:How to get Ubuntu 9? (Score:1, Insightful)
spoken like a windows user.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can barely run xubuntu on a machine with 256megs or ram let alone full ubuntu.
>The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
Considering netbooks are shipping with 7 and ram costs less than shipping, I'll take the 2gig model, thanks. More ram for my apps.
Re:It's FREE! as long as... (Score:2, Insightful)
And Windows costs no matter if you value your time or not. Even nicer!
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:2, Insightful)
A lesson for Windows Engineers. Aim for 256MB, not 2GB. The era of Netbooks is upon us, and it looks like Microsoft will miss the bus.
Aim for 256MB? Are you still living in 2001? I just replaced my 1.6ghz/256MB laptop with a netbook with a similar speed processor but 1GB of RAM. That laptop could barely get by with that much RAM. Firefox could only handle maybe 4 pages at a time and if one was loading video it would go to a crawl. My netbook has no issues, both were running Windows Home. A lesson for Windows Engineers, don't aim for 256MB.
Re:It's not released yet?! (Score:1, Insightful)
So it's not _officially_ released, is it?
Re: Bus (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah. People with those challenges tend to actually be far nicer than Microsoft!
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't you mean front?
All the "cool" people take the back seats.
Better than 9.04... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been testing out the beta and I've been finding that things are generally better than in 9.04. Hopefully this release should be more stable for Intel graphics card users too (the major work Intel was doing reworking their stuff is calming down). However be warned if you use multiple monitors and compiz - xorg lockups will lie in store. Boot speed is improved too. The Moblin version of Ubuntu felt unfinished though and had lots of lockups for me (plus it is absolutely not geared for enterprise style networks - I couldn't get on my Uni's wifi because with Moblin because there's nowhere to enter a wifi username. Regular Ubuntu was no issue though). Obviously some people are going to be upset about Pulseaudio being there but you can see improvements there that the Linux desktop has been needing for some time (even though it's not there yet).
There are areas that don't seem quite polished enough and people will moan about the Linux apps look terrible and how open source people keep doing this on purpose. If I hadn't seen multimon stability issues I would have already have switched from my 8.04 install.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:4, Insightful)
I dont think Im doing anything wrong, we just have different usage patterns. First off, the original poster claimed full ubuntu ran on 256megs of RAM. No, thats the minimum requirement for the standard installer. If you have a machine with less than that you need an alternate install disk. Or you do what I do: use xubuntu. I cant imagine running full ubuntu on less than 1gig.
My xubuntu machine barely runs at 256, which I think is a fair assessment. It boots, runs fine, but when I load up firefox, open a bunch of tabs, play some music, run a mail client, etc then it just runs out of RAM. I dont see its ram usage being much better than 2000 or even XP, but I have to deal with a less impressive and featured GUI.
That said, I am very impressed by xubuntu. Network manager could use some work. I usually just remove it and deal with IP addresses the old fashioned way. I think it hurts the linux community to spread lies about ram. Linux isnt magic. If you want to run a distro thats similar to the bells and whistles of OSX or Win7 then youre going to have to use a similar amount of RAM. Youre not getting away with using 1/4 the ram without giving up gnome.
Samba? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why the Ubuntu team has never simplified the setup process for Samba. It is simple enough to share a folder with unlimited access, but as soon as you want to create users and passwords, it becomes rather complex. I've had to set it up a couple of times, and I never seem to get it to work quite right.
Many Ubuntu users are also going to be running a Windows machine on their local network. If the goal is to give them a positive experience with Linux, then setting up the connections on the local network should be brain-dead easy. Imagine sending a novice user to this page [ubuntu.com]! They would soon be throwing away their Ubuntu disk and installing Windows.
Making an easy GUI for this configuration process shouldn't be that difficult. I hope that it will be addressed sometime soon.
Ubuntu One: Secret Plans? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to assume that there are some "secret" plans involving Ubuntu One that make a lot of sense (if you know them) and can actually explain why Ubuntu One exists in the first place. I've read through all the public documentation and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what is even remotely unique or noteworthy about the service.
Right now, it's attempting to be a Dropbox clone. However, it's not yet there and is clearly still in beta -- even though they have the same pricing structure as the (very mature) Dropbox. Their goal for the file synchronization service is to be as full-featured as Dropbox? But not more? Seriously, if your goal is to be as good as Dropbox, then why not just use Dropbox?
It's not even that "Ubuntu One is OSS and Dropbox is proprietary". Both services have OSS parts and proprietary parts.
Maybe, then, they are trying to be more of an online backup service, ala Mozy? Well... no. I can't find any evidence that they encrypt your data so it would be a bust as online backup.
So I don't get it. Why would anybody use (much less pay for) it when there are much more robust services already out there AND there's no indication that it'll actually be better than those services in any way. There must be some secret plans that I just don't know about.
Anybody feel like letting me know what I missed?
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
So if they aim for being usable on 256mb of ram, just imagine how much faster than that it would run on 1gb!
When system X runs on 256mb as fast as system Y runs in 1gb ram, it is usually a given that system X will FAR outperform system Y on the same 1gb system.
Whats not to like?
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds fair, but I think we should be clear then that it's not xubuntu that's using your RAM, but rather the apps you're running. As I said in my other post, I've set my parents up with a machine with only 96 MB RAM, but they're using claw email client and epiphany (I think, they're _definitely_ not using firefox!), and their usage is basic.
I agree though - Linux isn't magic, and if you want to run a machine with little RAM you'll need to work within that constraint. Having said that, I don't know which other modern OS they could run with so little RAM.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering netbooks are shipping with 7 and ram costs less than shipping
Real Netbooks are devices like the SmartQ5 and the SmartQ7 which I have got evaluation pieces from China for about $170 a piece. These devices contain the ARM-11 series processor with 256MB of RAM and 1GB of storage.
Windows7 requires regular disk drives and that makes it a mini-Notebook; not a Netbook.
Basically Microsoft took the Netbook, added a disk and forced it onto the market through big-name h/w vendors. This will not work with the ARM-range of Netbooks on which Windows will not run; but Maemo, Ubuntu, Fedora etc run decently enough.
Torrentz PLZ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:1, Insightful)
You cannot buy a 2gig netbook. Microsoft won't sell windows at netbook price rates to go on machines with over 1gig of memory.
Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T (Score:4, Insightful)
On a side note. It would be nice if the Ubuntu installer by default created a seperate /home partition. (or maybe they have in the last version or so, I haven't installed from scratch).
Uh, why? For most people, that's just a pain in the ass... suddenly you have to guess how much space you'll want in / and /home, and if you underestimate, you find yourself having to resize filesystems. And for those who care (such as yourself), you can easily set things up that way during the initial install.
RAM uses power (Score:3, Insightful)
Currently it doesn't matter too much because the main power consumption is in the display. But new display technology will change this.
Canonical's big opportunity is in mobile devices and in the Third World where power is expensive. Xubuntu is already a much nicer system than earlier versions of Windows.
Slightly OT, but the car industry has already bought into the logic. The new VW engine that replaces the 3 litre V6 is a 2-litre inline 4 that generates more power, is lighter and has 20% better fuel consumption. Nobody is saying "but my last Golf had a 3-litre V6, this is crap". Companies that focus on doing more with less are future proofing themselves.
Re:Before Installing, note: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bugs like this always make me worry about Ubuntu's hard release dates. The Ubuntu One bug sounds like a pretty big problem. Would it have killed them to fix this problem and delay the release? I know slippery release dates cause other problems (DNF [wikipedia.org]), but do you really want a major release to have serious problems like this?
Re:Before Installing, note: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey it is ubuntu. It is not supposed to work! :)
Seriously! When microsoft treated user like beta-tester we hated them. And now we praise ubuntu which does even worse...
I am very happy with my debian stable. I know there are no such critical bugs in it.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Correct! Also why have OSes gotten so large they required DVDs! I remember being able to install 3.11 for workgroups off a series of floppies, why can't we go back to that?!"
Because...then we'd be running Windows 3.11?
*shudders*
Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T (Score:4, Insightful)
Why a separate /home? So that you can easily do a clean install of the next version from CD without blowing away all your data.
I learned that lesson several releases ago. I have 10GB / for the OS, and the rest in /home.
Re:Personal Cloud... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know that Slashdot is going down hill when a perfectly reasonable comment asking for more information is replied to by three sarcastic comments about tubes, trucks, and pipes.
Ubuntu One looks like it uses other Ubuntu One users to store up to 2GB of data (hopefully securely) in a cloud-like state, e.g. with redundancy so that one failure doesn't cause you to lose those backups. I got that from a brief look at https://one.ubuntu.com/ [ubuntu.com]
Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? With disks sufficiently large these day, just allocate 10GB for Ubuntu and take the rest for /home.
And then you run out of that 10GB because you're working with large video files, or decide to rip your audio collection to disk. Hell, my /home was over 20GB before I cleared out some old cruft I no longer needed (just one directory, the result of a large .torrent, was over 5GB).
Meanwhile, you still haven't explained the advantages of putting /home on a separate partition.
If you don't trust that, simply use LVM. Really, this is childsplay.
What part of "average user" don't you understand? If you understand enough to use LVM, you understand enough to set up the partition table the way you see fit. Again, we're talking about Ubuntu's *default* configuration. And I've yet to see an argument for why the default installation should have /home on a separate partition.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Microsoft got on the bus and then forced the bus company to turn the bus into a jumbo jet so that Microsoft's fat ass could fit in the seats.
Re:Before Installing, note: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny, because I thought the premise was bottom-of-the-barrel computer users. Those don't have backups. Just saying...
Your solution is just as bad as mine for the computers users who are targeted by Ubuntu.
Re:Ubuntu Bleeding Edge Features Ready for Prime T (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny, because I thought the premise was bottom-of-the-barrel computer users. Those don't have backups. Just saying...
And they also don't understand how to re-install Ubuntu and have it use their old /home partition (to do that, you have to use the advanced partitioning mode). Average users will just upgrade. And if they do that, then having /home on a separate partition presents absolutely zero advantages, while creating the pain of a more inflexible storage arrangement.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:4, Insightful)
actually, I disagree with that statement. Imagine a world where every app required 1Gb RAM to run acceptably (Office 2010 anyone?). What you will see is not an app that runs slow if you give it less and faster if you give it more, but an app that runs slowly no matter how much you give it.
Think of that 1Gb, how long does it take to get that off disk and into RAM? Or, if the ram usage is calculated/generated and the disk image is tiny, how long does it take to fill it up with what ever it is doing?
that said, once you have the app that has all that RAM used, how much of it will fit into the CPU caches? How much time will be spent shifting data from RAM to L3 to L2 to L1 caches - and if the CPU is waiting for data to be updated in its cache, its certainly not running at those multi-gigahertz speeds, you'd be better off with an old 200 Mhz P3 and a gigabyte of L1 cache!
Of course, we wont even go into the time it takes if you end up swapping!
It doesn't matter if an app used 64k or 1Mb - both those numbers are still quite small, small enough not to make a difference that you'd notice. But when the memory usage creeps up to tremendous levels, you know its going to run like a dog. 200Mb plus another 200Mb swapped out is normal for some apps. Guess how well they run?
In some cases I wouldn't be worried about an app that did use a lot of memory, if its used for data structures or cached data, but these slow apps seem to be built on bloated frameworks that make them use masses of ram just to do nothing (well, just to make a lazy programmer's life a little bit easier)
An app that requires 256MB will always run faster than one that takes 1Gb, even if you have a machine with 100Gb RAM. RAM may be cheap but I/O bandwidth is not.
RAM is meant to be used, but I'd like that to be used by the OS to cache the disk, or whatever it likes, not to have all that gobbled up by apps that leave the OS with little left over to cache with.
Re:Canonical does something right for a change (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubuntu still needs to change a lot (scrap Upstart/clone FreeBSD init, get rid of DKMS, ideally get rid of crapt-get and clone ports, revert to OSS for sound, get rid of the insane scenario where GNOME is irremovably fused with virtually the entire rest of the system)
Or you could just run FreeBSD, rather than trying to turn Ubuntu into it...
Re:Samba? (Score:3, Insightful)
The calculator in Windows works just like a small handheld calculator, and so it won't allow you to enter the second decimal point. However, it is also limited in the same ways as a small handheld calculator.
The Ubuntu calculator allows for expressions, not just numbers. You can enter something like this:
(47/6 - 13.222) * 8.3
And it will give you the answer. This is much better than what the Windows calculator provides. As for 2.2.2, why would anyone enter that? Isn't it better to give the user feedback about this typo? Someone who enters 2.2.2 probably intended to enter 2+2.2 or something along those lines. In the Ubuntu calculator, they would realize their mistake. In the Windows calculator, they would have the wrong answer and not know it.
To me, this is a perfect example of rejecting Linux just because it is different, even when the difference is an improvement.
Re:Before Installing, note: (Score:3, Insightful)
If MS released WinFS in a situation where one user is reporting file corruption that doesn't appear to occur for anyone else? We'd be shocked at the improvement.
Re:Canonical does something right for a change (Score:2, Insightful)
Ubuntu still needs to change a lot (scrap Upstart/clone FreeBSD init, get rid of DKMS, ideally get rid of crapt-get and clone ports, revert to OSS for sound, get rid of the insane scenario where GNOME is irremovably fused with virtually the entire rest of the system) in order to become a system I'd consider installing,
...or you could install another distro which satisfies your needs, instead of asking to completely change the aim and view of ubuntu. Let diversity reign in FOSS
Bloody hell!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've done installs of Ubuntu on a virtual machines a couple of times but my initial experiences led me to stay away because I really like the development tools in Ubuntu and development really isn't Ubuntu's core strength - the end user desktop is or was. Installing dev tools felt like a right pain the behind and the fact that they didn't seem to allow let alone encourage custom kernel compilation put me right off. Fair enough I thought. I'm a geek I can stick with something else.
However pushing a release of an end user system like this that corrupts large files is just fucking moronic. I'm dumbfounded. Add allegations of pushing cloud computing shite to the mix and I'm giving Ubuntu a wide berth for now. This only confirms that i want to find another distro. Centos and Debian are looking to me like the leading distros for a geek to use, though I haven't checked out some of the others for a while. I don't hear as much about Mandrivel and SUSE these days.
Re:Canonical does something right for a change (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just unsure why trying (and failing, for the most part) to be a half-assed Windows clone is such a great thing for Linux to do.
And I'm not sure why trying to emulate FreeBSD is "such a great thing for Linux to do". I like apt and it's killer dependency handling and associated, vast software repository. I like kernel modules and the fact that I don't have to build custom kernels anymore (I've done that, I've moved on). And PulseAudio. And faster boot times.
In short: I like the fact that Linux is growing past it's Unix roots and embracing good ideas from *everywhere*, as I realize that an operating system frozen in the 1980's isn't necessarily a good thing.
Linux was originally a UNIX clone, before Mark Shuttleworth got hold of it.
Holy shit, I can't even describe how much bullshit that is. Package managers? Kernel modules? Sound daemons? What, you think Shuttleworth invented those ideas? Good god, have you paid *any* attention to the last 15 years of development in the Linux world?
Ubuntu is the natural consequence of years of development as Linux has matured into an OS that consumers can actually use. If you don't like that, please, just go away and enjoy FreeBSD. It exists to do what you want. Leave Ubuntu, and Linux, the hell alone.
Canonical have had to do some fairly unnatural things to force Linux to resemble Windows to the degree that they have.
Total, utter bullshit. Canonical has done *nothing* that hadn't been pioneered by others. They just did a better job of refining it than anyone else.
What I want to know is why you're even participating in a discussion about Ubuntu, or Linux in general. Clearly you're a BSD fanboi... or perhaps I just fell for a troll?
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it will run gnome or kde in that configuration.
Re:It says: 256MB RAM... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then SAY that! Say "I surfed to that site to run a server-side script / call a cgi program / request data from a server [what X would do]". And not "I connected to a 'cloud'". Because that sounds silly, retarded, and PHBy at the same time.
I can just as well invent cool new words for old things, and then act as if I'm sooo avant-garde. Like those "AJAX" people... guess what, I did that, years before the word or the API were even invented (trough using the OBJECT tag and some JS).
Same thing here. Now because I have some app running on a server, that I can interact with with a browser, I suddenly can "Connect to my cloud."?
The level of retardation to think like that boggles the mind... It's the typical behavior of people who are so dumb that they think they are smarter than you and that you don't get it. Because what you say is waay over their head that they have parse errors, resulting in non-understandable logic.