Ubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat, Now Available 473
teeks99 writes "The latest version of Ubuntu — 10.10, called Maverick Meerkat — has been released. This release contains new improvements, like an update to the Ubuntu One online service (with music streaming), Shotwell instead of F-Spot, the new Unity interface (for netbooks), and an upgrade to just about every piece of existing software. The announcement e-mail has more details."
Kubuntu too! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:early (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Make sure you don't care about what's in ~/Pictures
rm -rf ~/Pictures
ln -s [folder you care about] ~/Pictures
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and before someone rabbles "ITS THE COMMAND LINE THIS IS WHY LINUX IS NOT READY FOR THE DESKTOP RAGAGEDHDHA" there's a GUI way to do it: Right click the folder in nautilus and click Make Link, you'll get a shortcut. Delete the Pictures folder, cut and paste that link file that was made and rename it to Pictures.
It's extremely good. (Score:0, Informative)
I've been using the pre-releases since they've become available, and I haven't had any problems whatsoever. I've installed them on around 60 different computers used by developers, accountants and managers without any issue whatsoever. While the pre-release versions are rock-solid enough for them to use daily, I do it knowing that Ubuntu makes it damn easy to upgrade to the final release.
Before, we were using the final releases of Fedora, but it was a total disaster. Fedora 13 was the breaking point. It was so full of bugs and other problems that we had to find something better, and Ubuntu was it.
Thanks to being built upon Debian, Ubuntu gets to take advantage of all of the professionalism and real-world experience that the Debian community has to offer. We just don't find that within the Fedora community.
Re:Announcing ubuntu releases (Score:5, Informative)
Fedora: 12-beta [slashdot.org], 12 [slashdot.org], 13-alpha [slashdot.org], 13 [slashdot.org]-
Windows: Vista SP2 [slashdot.org], 7 date announced [slashdot.org], 7 beta [slashdot.org], 7 [slashdot.org].
Mac OSX: Tiger [slashdot.org], Snow Leopard [slashdot.org]
You were saying?
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, the user-space changes seem irrelevant.
But, the kernel is worth the upgrade - along with some other userspace requirements that go hand-in-hand with the kernel.
For example, the (newer?) Xorg for using newer features from the graphics/drm drivers etc.
The newer kernel gives you:
o. more h/w support (drivers moved from staging into mainline)
o. newer filesystems (ceph anyone?)
o. newer archs (tile is now included in mainline)
- just to name a few reasons.
Granted I haven't checked what all is actually bundled, but if you can live with manually updating the kernel and the bits that go along with it, you can definitely stick with 10.04LTS provided you're not on paid support from Canonical which might get voided if you change the kernel.
As time passes by, the distro is bound to get into equilibrium - at which point, we can't expect major changes.
Re:Are all these versions needed? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade [ubuntu.com]
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:5, Informative)
I find it frustrating that a more complete list of new features and new versions isn't listed with the announcement. I found this blog posting : http://linux.gauravlive.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat-whats-new/ [gauravlive.com]
Gnome 2.32
KDE 4.5.0 (QT 4.7)
Default KDE browser Rekonq
Pulse Audio is the default sound server
Firefox 3.6.9
OpenOffice 3.2.1
Evolution 2.30.3
F-Spot => Shotwell
Btrfs now available (though, this is still experimental)
kernel 2.6.35-22.33
X.org version 1.9
Re:Any good? (Score:5, Informative)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/625793 [launchpad.net]
If you use a second keyboard layout and switching, don't upgrade, this still isn't fixed and it's hell, at random points in time it starts rapidly changing the layout, leading to weird results in what you type.
Also there are two problems with the NVidia driver - one is that the text is horribly slow with the included driver, you need to install the beta from the site, and the other is that the nouveau driver fucks up the card and makes it impossible to use the card, so I had to revert to an older kernel. There's a bug for this too somewhere, can't remember the ID.
Re:Announcing ubuntu releases (Score:4, Informative)
Well, Ubuntu, like it or not, is the most popular linux distribution (that, or its users just have very loud mouths). I honestly don't see what the big deal about Ubuntu is anymore. Linux Mint does a much better job at being easy-to-use right out of the box (and doesn't make stupid design decisions involving window buttons... cough cough). For the more geek-inclined, Fedora is a very un-assuming distribution and makes for a much less awkward first experience compared to Ubuntu. And for the extremely geek-inclined, Arch Linux and just plain-ol-Debian are awesomeness. I'm using Arch right now, and if you can get it set up right the first time (thanks to their awesome documentation), you get a rolling release system with constant updates and a gigantic user repository of packages (I even maintain some packages for them, and it is to stupidly easy to make a pacman package that I'm never going back to deb/rpm)!
Thankfully, it's incredibly easy to distro-hop if you don't like the current distribution you're using enough ;)
Re:early (Score:4, Informative)
Wohoo! This proves how the world is all Determined by the Lord in all its greatness.
Or that no such lord exists. I'd rather stick to that one.
Re:Any good? (Score:3, Informative)
I've been using it a couple of months on a Dell Mini 9.
The upgrade was *flawless*. I've done enough bad Ubuntu upgrades that I find this remarkable, and very cheering. Ubuntu upgrades are notoriously terrible - particularly compared to how well Debian does - and I'm glad they appear to be paying more attention now.
Using it has been just fine and absolutely smooth. I'm using standard 10.10, not the netbook version - there's no reason not to IMO.
Two thumbs up! Four stars! Upgrade, er, tomorrow, when the servers aren't melting!
Re:Any good? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm using the standard gnome interface on my netbook now. I think Unity's got potential to become something really quite good, but I don't think it's ready yet.
Re:Announcing ubuntu releases (Score:5, Informative)
Although I would tend to agree with you, I use KUbuntu 10.04 today on my laptop and my MythTV box at home. Simply put, they're well put together, well supported and don't suffer from some of the strange GUI ideas that Canonical put in the regular Ubuntu (which shooed me away from it for a LONG time I might add).
I have used Macs for years, and still have my Macbook Pro for a few applications I just can't get under Linux (for example my own business is mostly managed using iRatchet, and I still haven't got a good way to get music and podcasts to my iPhone from Linux) but it took playing with KUbuntu on my laptop to convince me that Linux was ready for me to return. I used to run all kinds of distros... I have run Fedora numerous times, Gentoo, Redhat... you name it. I like the fact that for the most part Kubuntu gets out of my way and lets me get my work done the same way OSX does. I've had a couple of issues with wireless network not working after updates, but I find a second reboot usually clears that up. Other than that, it's rock solid stable, gets me better battery life than Windows 7 on the same hardware and generally just works like an operating system should.
Of course, freedom of choice is what Linux is all about anyway... and yes Mint is a great distro as well. However, I found that if I have a problem with Kubuntu it's usually much easier to find answers than it is for Mint simply because of the larger community of users.
Re:Have they made GDM configurable/themeable yet? (Score:3, Informative)
I know, I know, this is only a login manager, and it works OK despite being fugly. But FFS, at least in Debian Squeeze the old GDM is one apt-get away.
It works "OK" at best. I have dual monitors. Boot happens on primary display. X comes up with the cursor one pixel to the right of center which puts it on the secondary display. The GDM menu (top or bottom of the screen, as configured) appears on the secondary display. The user chooser shows up on the primary display. This is the most goofy version of Ubuntu since the bad old days before Edgy, everything is like this. Bootsplash just went away during my upgrade, is it supposed to be text-only or did they just bone the package database sometime during my upgrade cycle? I get some kind of elf error on boot that's in the middle of the screen because their text bootsplash doesn't put the cursor someplace sane in between updates to the throbber. They're crapping it up and breaking things (see rants about bluetooth dongle, which works perfectly on Lucid, even audio works, but they broke it in Maverick) to the point where I want to go back to Debian.
Re:Have they made GDM configurable/themeable yet? (Score:4, Informative)
customization of the login screen? It was made obsolete by the gnome devs not by canonical and the reason for that was faster boot time. Yes, this sucks, I liked keyboard only logging but ubuntu team is not guilty here (unless you think they should keep and maintain legacy software)
Still ships with rsyslog 4.2 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:3, Informative)
The preferences dialog didn't come until 0.6.1, the GP posts are probably using the older version.
The newer binaries for Lucid (and Maverick) are here [launchpad.net].
SB
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but Fedora isn't based on RHEL, is it? Debian/Fedora are both community distros, and Ubuntu/RHEL are commercially supported distros based on them. Ergo Ubuntu is more "professional" then Fedora.
Re:Any good? (Score:5, Informative)
People try Ubuntu because of the hype, then tar all linux distros with the same brush.
Re:I'll take that bet and raise you ten. (Score:5, Informative)
"In January 2001, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates explained the attraction of adopting Linux in an internal memo that was released in the Comes vs Microsoft case. He said:
“ Our most potent Operating System competitor is Linux and the phenomena around Open Source and free software. The same phenomena fuels competitors to all of our products. The ease of picking up Linux to learn it or to modify some piece of it is very attractive. The academic community, start up companies, foreign governments and many other constituencies are putting their best work into Linux.[122]"
In short, Linux is much more than a blip.
Re:early (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:4, Informative)
In my corporate experience the rule was you only install software that you have already bought support contracts for, and only install it on hardware certified from the vendor to work.
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:5, Informative)
Consider a filesystem. It consists of a series of descriptive headers, and associated file data (inode, data and directory information if we stay within a posix compliant definition).
"fscking" or checking a filesystem that is in an "unknown" state (basically, doing a forensic analysis) means that we will need to look at the blocks comprising the file system, identifying the descriptive headers and associated file data, dealing with potential overlaps, and extracting the data.
Of course, this requires at least one pass over all data on the disk, and (given the current state of hard disk i/o) this operation will take days on a 5TB disk.
How is this sped up? One answer is to only allow inodes to reside on certain (pre-determined) disk locations. This strategy reduces the time to scan for files to just examining the potential inodes. Also, as long as there is no overlap, data does not need to be copies. The can dramatically reduce the time needed.
We can also use a journal; if the inodes are presumed correct, and all inode updates go through the journal, everything can be brought to "correctness" in the time needed to scan the journal. But, we are PRESUMING the inode correctness -- an errant filesystem driver or firmware may have "scribbled" somewhere it shouldn't have.
A log based filesystem can provide for "fast" checking -- but, again, we are presuming correctness of the already written data.
Something like ZFS can provide for a solution -- given sufficient memory. But, to ensure data integrity, each piece of written data must be redundantly written. And, the data must be scrubbed at a sufficient interval.
Log-based systems are not yet in common use; ZFS is solaris or bsd only, with production systems using solaris. btrfs is not yet ready for production use (and isn't even comparable to ZFS yet).
The only practical (current) production answer in the Linux space is journaling, with underlying RAID.
Of course, it's your data, and if you are comfortable using and testing btrfs, go for it.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:3, Informative)
That's why you make a script. Or copy/paste again from the original source, which could be a website or an email.
That's because you already understand what you want to do, and know perhaps 90% of what's required and are only missing minor details like what you mentioned.
But in my experience, newbies don't want that. They want rigid commands. They laboriously take notes and make lists like:
1. Click Start
2. Click "Program files"
3. Click Microsoft Word
However that fails horribly the second something unexpected happens. For instance, "Start" is not called "Start" because they're using a french OS, the taskbar has been accidentally moved to the top or a side of the screen, or they moved from XP to Vista, or the menu has "helpfully" hidden the infrequently used items, and Word doesn't appear at first sight in it anymore.
It's really hard to give instructions that account for all the possible trivial but confusing variations in a GUI. It's maddening over the phone because you have to describe something without being able to show it, and only slightly less so online.
Command lines have much less variability to them. "ls" is still "ls", and "cp" is still "cp", and so are many other things. So quite a few scripts from 10 years ago will work perfectly fine. GUI instructions need to be constantly updated to keep up with different languages, and minor OS revisions, and are much more time consuming to test to make sure they still apply.
Where do you get the knowledge where to click in a GUI? You always have that problem
Then you use tab completion, or simply take advantage of that somebody already figured the path out for you, and copy/paste it from a forum. If you need to do it multiple times, bookmark or make a script.
Usability is best with neither, really.
The best usability belongs to the TUI: The single tasked full screen (normally text) application. A good one has a very linear workflow, lacks hot keys that cause unexpected results, and can very reliably used by the "follow a list" method because everything is always done the same way, is in the same place, is done in the same order and looks the same as yesterday, and there's no way for the user to change that.
Re:I'll take that bet and raise you ten. (Score:3, Informative)
No, Apple has its niche of high-end computers and will not give it up. From that position it does not threaten Microsoft - Apple does not have a single laptop under $1k, so they have not made any netbooks, meaning that Microsoft continues to dominate the cheap market. Also, Apple has been generally ignoring much of the business scene. Apple does have iPhones and iPads, but those are not markets that desktop Windows could get into. This is why Linux is so dangerous - it attacks Windows in both business and on the average person's desktop. Windows and Linux simply cannot coexist, and Microsoft knows that.
Re:"I wanted to try debian..." (Score:3, Informative)
Very interesting! However if I use this Linux Mint Debian Edition am I really using Debian?
For example, do they fork their code like Ubuntu does? If I report bugs in this will Debian accept them? If the answer is no then what is the point in switching from one Debian derivative to another.
The answer is yes. It's the exact same thing as debian with Mint's default customizations and extra repositories for Mint-specific applications, like mintDesktop, mintBackup, mintNanny, etc.
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:2, Informative)
I use RHEL5 at work. I hate it with the fiery passion of a million supernovas. It doesn't help that rhel5 is like six years old, and 5.4 isn't much better. Who else likes using a version of gedit so old it doesn't even have syntax highlighting?
RHEL 5.5 is the current release version, not 5.4. 5.5 has been available since the end of March.
I use Centos (equivalent to RHEL) and the version of gedit that it comes with (2.16.0) has syntax highlighting.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a really superb programmer's editor I highly recommend geany [geany.org].
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:3, Informative)
Nonsense. Macos subjects you to those same style of workaround. Linux is no more unsuitable than macos in this regard.
--mistyped on an idevice
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:1, Informative)
Plus the Software Center improvements. It's becoming easier and easier to discover cool software. They've also added an app store to the Software Center.
10.10 is probably the first Linux distro that I feel comfortable recommending to non-geeks.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:3, Informative)
WTH?? Why are you avoiding mechanism which is in place for those things, namely XDG user dirs? Shotwell, as every good behaving application, uses directory which user defined for storing pictures. This define can be changed with command
xdg-user-dirs-update --set PICTURES [folder you care about]
Or by editing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:2, Informative)
Ext4 doesn't have online defrag yet, it is planned. Btrfs has an fsck tool but it is not capable of fixing any problems on the disk, it can apparently only let you know there are problems (I say apparently because while I've used btrfs I haven't before had to fsck it thanks to lots of luck with not running into any hiccups during my usage). They say as much on the front page of the Btrfs wiki [kernel.org]. To quote the main page of this wiki:
So not only are you railing against ext4 for a fsck operation which should take a long time (5TB? Come on, most people don't have 1TB in their box, and we're talking about desktop users), but you are unawares of the features and capabilities of both filesystems you are discussing. Btrfs is great, but it's not something Average Joe should be using just yet either in production or on their desktop. I have used it before and I will use it again in the future, but it is not complete yet.
If I had any mod points I probably just would have modded up ratboy666's reply because he did a fantastic job of explaining the whole situation.