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."
Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:5, Interesting)
As I use neither Unity nor Ubuntu One, I'm going to be sticking with 10.04, which is the latest long term support version. In fact, I think I'll even install 10.04 instead of 10.10 when I buy a new computer later this year.
I seem to recall previous, preliminary announcements claiming that there would be more items upgraded in 10.10. I wonder if I was imagining that, or if Canonical decide some of the other upgrades were not worth the effort? (Or maybe I was thinking of Xubuntu.)
Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:3, Interesting)
As a photographer, I like Shotwell. As a programmer, I like it a little more than the mono updates that come along with f-spot (and I don't like Miguel).
But here's what's kept me from abandoning gthumb2 for shotwell. Shotwell keeps pictures in ~/Pictures by default. There is no way for it to randomly pick up a directory and operate on it. I've often thought about hacking that up, but for Vala & the associated learning curve I've been too lazy to tackle.
And now, for an encore can we kick tomboy too out of the CD?
Slashdotted already (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems that at least from my location in Northern Europe the ISOs are not downloadable due to the server having been already Slashdotted. But luckily the files are also avaialble as official .Torrents [ubuntu.com]. Download speed currently 3MB/s, or the absolute maximum my DSL can handle.
Re:Any good? (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems so far to be pretty good. It feels like a slight evolution of 10.04 rather than the huge leap 10.04 was from 9.10. There isn't a huge amount different, but that might explain why it seems much more stable than 9.10 and 10.04 were when they were initially released.
The nicest new feature is the beautiful ubuntu font.
Re:early (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It seems I got it last night (Score:4, Interesting)
I wanted to try debian but it's simply not as accessible as Ubuntu is.
When you go to Ubuntu.com you click the "Download Ubuntu" button and then hit "start download". Done and easy.
When you go to debian.org you're greeted with information overload. Lots of completely useless information and I had to figure out that you need to go to "getting debian" link in the menu. After you're there I'm still mystified as to what I'm suppose to download. Testing? Release? No recommendation as to what to use.
You click on the stable release and i386 and it shows you a list of 31 CDs.. lol wut? I'm suppose to download them all or what?
Ok lets try again. debian.org -> click the "latest stable release of Debian" link -> intel 86 link -> ???
Ok lets try again. debian.org -> click "available versions of Debian" link -> ... wait a sec that's the same as above!!
Ok lets try again. debian.org -> click "getting a copy" -> oh great it's that getting debian page again..
I give up!!
Shotwell? (Score:3, Interesting)
Will that one be able to open a folder of ~50-60 average JPEGs without choking on swap on a 2GB RAM machine?
Re:Any good? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm having the same issue with a Dell Latitude e6510 with the nvidia video card on 10.04. I was hoping it would be resolved by 10.10.
Google e6510 ubuntu problem for details.
Why I like Maverick Meerkat and Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)
Lately, what I have been primarily running has been Ubuntu's Maverick Meerkat's alpha and then beta. Not to suggest the alpha was always rock-solid - sometimes huge bugs crept up in it that had me switching back to my stable Ubuntu Lucid Lynx distribution. But if they were bad they were usually dealt with swiftly.
Here is why I think Ubuntu, Canonical and Maverick Meerkat have done a great job.
In February of this year, I was installing Debian squeeze on another system. Once installed, I looked in /etc/fstab to see information on my disk partitions. The disk information was in UUID format, and a comment line in fstab said "Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device". So, I did what the file told me and did a "vol_id --uuid". But it didn't work. There was no vol_id program. I did a little digging and saw that the vol_id program had been a part of the udev package on lenny, but now it no longer was. The program to decode those mysterious UUID's had disappeared. I did a little more digging and discovered the blkid program in the util-linux package could decode those UUIDs. I tried it out, it translated the UUIDs to device names for me, and I was happy. However, I realized /etc/fstab was still giving everyone faulty information. So in February I filed a bug report [debian.org] with Debian.
So now it is October, and my bug report sits in Debian's bug tracker, undisturbed by anyone. There have been four updates to the partman-target package (which creates the initial /etc/fstab) since my bug, but none implementing my suggestion to remove the outdated suggestion of using the no longer existent vol_id program, and replacing it with a suggestion to use blkid. In August, Debian squeeze froze in anticipation of release, so it becomes more unlikely my bug will be fixed.
So where does Ubuntu stand with all of this? Well back in May, Ubuntu resynchronized their partman-target with Debian. While doing so, someone checked out Debian's bug tracker, saw my report, and fixed the problem in Ubuntu. While their change log [launchpad.net] in May notes this, I can see it myself when looking at /etc/fstab on my meerkat - "Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier for a device".
So this - I find impressive. I am having a problem with Debian and report a bug there, although it remains unfixed. But Ubuntu comes in and fixes the bug which was put on the bug tracker of another system.
Yes, this is just talking about the quality of the distribution and not all of the other things involved, which of course, are important. I know how some Debian developers were (and some still are) unhappy with Canonical and Ubuntu, and how some other upstream contributors are unhappy with Canonical (like Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman) and so forth. And whatever acrimony exists, I think the Debian folks and Linux folks and the like are right that Canonical and Ubuntu have to find a way to push more patches upstream. Here is a case though where the bug fix was already upstream, but only Ubuntu decided to implement it.
Considering that I got Ubuntu for free (as in beer), I have been very happy with the responsiveness of the (Canonical etc.) Ubuntu team to my problems and patches via their bug-tracking system, Launchpad. As far as I'm concerned, it is one of the best, and probably largest, testbeds of the Gnome desktop environment out there. I think it's really going to allow for a good, integrated Gnome desktop environment experience, and hopefully the Canonical/Gnome relationship goes w
Re:Kubuntu too! (Score:3, Interesting)
Fun ride. (Score:4, Interesting)
I feel Ubuntu's momentum within the FOSS community is starting to fade.
The greatest thing Ubuntu did was making a name. It attracted lot's of people and became something you can actually "sell" to business and the masses.
Ubuntu also *had* the best mindset of volunteers, helping and polite instead of RTFM grunts.
Lastly they also did a lot to push in the direction of hardware detection and ease of installation, yes, the Debian installer existed before Ubuntu but they set it up to actually work on most hardware.
It was a fun ride.
Nowadays Ubuntu seems to be stagnated, most progress is in relation to services like Ubuntu one and such. Good for Ubuntu of course but not news worthy anymore. More like newsvertisment.
The few changes in the GUI also leave a bad taste in mouth, a sort of forced Mac-ness that nobody was asking for except the new "design" team. Worse yet in my POV is that the nicer volunteers are gone and are being replaced by a bunch of canonical yes-men.
This year was the year I switched off Ubuntu, I no longer felt loyal to the brand and simply switched to the next best thing I found. For the first time in 6 years news of a new Ubuntu release don't concern me, for the first time in 6 years I wasn't counting down the days before the release, it feels odd.
Thanks Canonical,thanks Mark, it was a fun ride.
Re:Kubuntu too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I love Kubuntu, and so if the other KDE distros are better then great. Heard good things about OpenSuse. However, I know I can get pretty much any software in existence packaged in a .deb these days, so I've no real desire to switch.
Phillip.
Re:I'll take that bet and raise you ten. (Score:5, Interesting)
Every time I ride the bus, I am struck by how many people are using iPhones -- particularly the poor people. It's counter-intuitive, until you realize that if you can only afford one Internet-capable device, instead of several, you're going to choose the one that does the most, which is most likely an iPhone.
I think a more accurate picture is that Microsoft is challenged on the enterprise end by Linux, on the consumer end by Apple, and in the Internet by Google. Microsoft is powerful, but boxed in. I think there are signs that Microsoft is exploring alliances with the open source community in order to break out of that box.
Re:Any good? (Score:3, Interesting)
o_0 Did you actually dist-upgrade all the way along that chain?
No, sometimes I ran update-manager -dc :D
The best part was converting from x86 to x86_64... I forget where I did that, though. Pretty recently. The same install has been on various disks and filesystem types, and on probably six or seven different computers as defined by motherboard. That it works at all is amazing. I chalk that up more to Debian, Linux itself, and grub than anything else, but obviously Ubuntu has not managed to completely destroy all that is good about Debian and since I run it so much I obviously see value in it. I'm just pissed because right now I'm being boned again by a change they made. The last one was broken Linksys WUSB11... Linux is also the only real solution for a lot of machines designed for Vista, which is a real thing.
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:4, Interesting)
When MS Office 2007 came out everybody started receiving xlsx and docx files and the old versions of MS Office most folks had installed couldn't open them. For the die hards (there were a few) I installed the compatibility pack (buried in the bowels of Microsoft's site since I guess they figure most places are willing to just throw money out the Windows(tm) and will buy a new version but I see no reason to re-buy something as trivial as a word processing program which works perfectly well already), but lots of folks got Oo instead. I even changed the icons for some of them to "ease the transition" and to tell you the truth, a lot of them didn't notice the difference. Some that did liked the presentation program better than Powerpoint and swung the whole sales staff over just on that reason. When users ran into something that worked differently (like how to edit headers/footers or tracking changes) they just chalked it up to the "new version". Since we already use Firefox and Thunderbird some folks have migrated over to Ubuntu from Windows (I always used a LTS version but then found they had decided to upgrade to the bleeding edge on their own later and seemed to have no issues most of the time so I let them play). We're not a big company (maybe 100 PCs), and we do engineering and development work so most people are pretty tech savvy, but of course the big issue was our ERP system which is designed for Windows, but its turned out easier to maintain that through terminal services anyway.
"Might screw something up" (Score:3, Interesting)
Hardcoded paths in a user-space app is a bug, period, end of story.
Say all paths used by an application are stored in the application's configuration file. Where would the path to this configuration file be stored, other than hardcoding something like ~/.$appname/preferences.ini?
It's very simple for one person who knows how to do something using a command line to communicate that to someone else
It's also very simple for one person to communicate instructions that are the equivalent of sudo rm -rf /. For this reason, some users feel afraid to touch a Terminal for fear that they "might screw something up". A fear of typing commands appears to be common among people who only occasionally interact with PCs. I deal with an older relative who routinely asks me to remind her whether she has to use the space bar and capital letters in a Google search, rather than just trying it herself, out of fear that she "might screw something up" even within a web browser.
Re:Fun ride. (Score:4, Interesting)
Lastly they also did a lot to push in the direction of hardware detection and ease of installation, yes, the Debian installer existed before Ubuntu but they set it up to actually work on most hardware.
Seriously? No, that was the first thing Ubuntu did; it was (and is) the primarily reason that Ubuntu made a name. Amongst geeks, it was "hey, try Ubuntu, it's Debian but with better hardware support", and amongst the neophites, it's "try Ubuntu, it's an easy to use Linux".
The volunteers, likewise, followed. They're there simply because it was easy to use, and wasn't Vista or XP (for the most part).
If Ubuntu is 'starting to fade' it's for one of two reasons:
* Hey, Windows 7 is out now.
* Those people are growing up and not terribly fanatical - or they're graduating on to other things, like Debian or CentOS (or for that matter, jobs and girlfriends).
My point is: do not marginalize the significance of "just works" installation and hardware support. That is quite important for any "doesn't come preinstalled" OS. The focused on the kernel and the pretty clicky graphics, whereas Debian, on which it is based, focused on utilities and tools. Those efforts, combined, resulted in a pretty solid system (yes, even now).
It's the same approach used by Stormix and Progeny years ago - the efforts of which are, likewise, part of Debian today.
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah right, if you're going to withold every patch for three months for testing you're just asking to get owned by worms and malware.
The IT at my workplace has the same "90-day Walled Garden" mentality which is why we're running ancient versions of the J2RE and Flash Player on all of the workstations. The IT is puzzed and wondering why the workstations are constantly getting infected by the so many of the same malwares.
Another company I worked for upgraded their workstations to XP when it was still in beta. When XP was finally released we had a huge jump on many competitors because we had already been running XP for so long we had worked out all of the kinks month before (meanwhile other companies were just beginning their long test cycle for XP). Absolutely nothing exploded when we jumped from beta to RTM.