Ubuntu 9.04 Released 620
Mohamed Zaian writes "Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition is free to download from Thursday 23 April. Also announced were the simultaneous releases of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (UNR). Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition delivers a range of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. Enhanced suspend-and-resume features also give users more time between charges along with immediate access after hibernation. Intelligent switching between Wi-Fi and 3G environments has been broadened to support more wireless devices and 3G cards, resulting in a smoother experience for most users."
Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:5, Funny)
Does it preload the "Gnome" menu yet, or do you still get that annoying pause when you first click on it?
Does the lovely dark Dusk theme work with Gnome 2.26?
Will it kill off hardware VIA graphics (HP 2133 netbook) like the last kernel upgrade, or does it now handle these properly as a third party binary blob?
Will it give me free beer and hookers?
Notifications (Score:5, Informative)
Seems generally more stable, I've been running the RC for a couple of days now. Not many immediately noticeable changes but lots of improved under the hood support. Beware if you have an older ATI card you might run into problems.
Anyway, the thing I'm really not sure of is the notifications system. Just about the only option with them seems to be to change their positioning via gconf-editor (and even that seems to be broken). I understand the philosophy behind them (see http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253 [markshuttleworth.com]) but they seem to be a little too unconfigurable, even for Gnome. Their black appearance would suit the KDE default theme, but it certainly doesn't fit in well with my much lighter Clearlooks theme in Gnome and there's no way to change that. One of the things I like about Gnome is the integrated look and feel of the entire system, whereas these stand out oddly. There is no way to dismiss them, so things get irritating when I want to use the search bar in Firefox and there's a notification covering it (these things could well be click transparent but it's still irritating). There is no way to configure what gets displayed as a notification either; I don't think I need each and every Pidgin message to be displayed as a notification for reasons of both privacy and distraction. To me, the notifications system seems a little too much like an answer looking for a problem. I may well disable them soon, after giving them a fair trial. The only sane way to do that seems to be to remove the notify-osd daemon. So much for ease of use!
That all said, it's my only major gripe with the upgrade, and that system was always going to be controversial. Hopefully it grows and improves. If not, I'm not forced to run it. Overall, this seems to be a steady incremental release that smoothes over a few rough patches and should hopefully do me well for another 6 months. Ubuntu is still the only distribution that I have not had very regular problems with on the desktop.
Re:Notifications (Score:5, Informative)
I think they need to look at Growl on Mac OS X to see how to implement a notifications system. At least Growl has an adjustable look and feel and configuration settings.
Re:Notifications (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, I figured out how to fix this for pidgin specifically. I kind of like it popping up a message when someone says something and the window doesn't have focus, but I don't need a notification every time someone comes online -- you can change this behavior in Pidgin's Tools->Plugins->Libnotify Popups->Configure Plugin.
Once it stopped doing that, I found that I mind much less, and having coherency between the volume control, email notification, etc, etc is sort of nice. I expect that the customizability will improve in the future, because otherwise the feature seems very sane; it's silly for every application to have their own way of displaying messages.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think I need each and every Pidgin message to be displayed as a notification for reasons of both privacy and distraction.
.
Probably needs a way to configure that. but in use it's not that bad at least it only sends you messages that are addressed at you.
If your browsing and in an Irc Chat or looking something up it's easy to miss something aimed for your attention and that pop up gets your attention for a couple of seconds, I found it quite useful. BTW if you don't want to talk, you could log out or mark yourself busy or something.
Actually thats a good point. if user has marked himself unavailable don't show the notification,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't really matter what I think, but if it's easy to do and effective someone might pick it up, costs me nothing to suggest it. :)
if i felt that strongly i'd do something more than post on slashdot. look what happened coz of that printer driver RMS couldn't hack
Re:Notifications (Score:5, Informative)
> Does it preload the "Gnome" menu yet, or do you
> still get that annoying pause when you first
> click on it?
Not sure it's preloading but I've not been noticing the delay this time round. Certainly seems much faster
> Does the lovely dark Dusk theme work with Gnome 2.26?
Do you mean Dust? If so it seems ok, though I've not run it for very long.
> Will it kill off hardware VIA graphics (HP 2133
> netbook) like the last kernel upgrade, or does
> it now handle these properly as a third party
> binary blob?
Don't know sorry.
> Will it give me free beer and hookers?
Yes
There's not a huge amount of shiny new toys but this release seems *much* more stable. Can't think of any regressions I've noticed this time round, which was very much not the case with Intrepid which was bloody awful (and Hardy which wasn't much better).
Looks like someone finally listened on the stability front. I was close to dumping Ubuntu personally.
Re:Notifications (Score:4, Interesting)
I just recently switched from Kubuntu to Arch and while Arch could use a little polish (while still being lean & mean) I'm liking it a lot right now. Bear in mind that while I was using Kubuntu, I used to do kernel development on Gentoo so I had enough of a skillset to handle Arch. So far I like that Arch has a fast package management system that works, allows me to compile my own packages without forcing me to do so (unlike Gentoo) and generally does not force me to install & run crap I don't want (Ubuntu: making me run wpa_supplicant... on a desktop that has no wireless card!!??!?!) .vimrc files so I had to blow-away the system defaults which made vim unusable for me, and it took more hacking to get ssh-agent working than it did with Ubuntu which set it up automatically. So: Arch wins on the core, loses on some of the polish, but I think it strikes a better balance for me than Kubuntu was doing... plus Arch's KDE 4.2 packages seem somewhat better behaved.
Arch does have some problems, like missing packages for wine in 64 bit (fortunately it is not too hard to build via AUR), the default vim installation would not recognize my
Re:Notifications (Score:4, Interesting)
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Except if you test it, it doesn't appear to work, which is probably why it was hidden.
Re:Notifications (Score:5, Interesting)
Beware if you have an older ATI card you might run into problems.
"Older," in this case, defined as anything prior to the HD3x00 series. My experience with 9.04 and a 2600XT is less than ideal.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> >Beware if you have an older ATI card you might run into problems.
> "Older," in this case, defined as anything prior to the HD3x00 series. My experience with 9.04 and a 2600XT is less than ideal.
One of Fedora's recent test days [fedoraproject.org] (in preparation for Fedora 11 [fedoraproject.org] which is due out soon) found a number of problems with ATI cards. Hopefully by the time F11 ships (in about a month) a number of the issues will be sorted.
Fixes made for Fedora will eventually benefit Ubuntu users using the OSS ATI drivers
Re:Notifications (Score:5, Insightful)
I was skeptical about the usefulness of those notifications when Shuttleworth first blogged about them, and after a couple weeks with them, I can safely say they need a lot of improvements.
For one, they are way too obtrusive. They are so frequent (I agree that there is no reason to have every IM, every contact sign-in/out broadcast up on the screen), and there is no way to dismiss them. Yes, I can hover "under" them and they fade away, but sometimes I just want the distraction to go away entirely.
And, that fading behavior is pretty worthless too. It's completely unintuitive. I am always moving my mouse over to the notification to interact with it (dismiss it, or whatever) only to have it completely disappear.
It's such a wasted opportunity too. If I get an IM, wouldn't it be sweet if I could click on the notification to bring up the window? Or, better yet, wouldn't it be sweet if I could send a quick reply in the notification bubble itself? Digsby on windows does this and it's pretty fantastic. But no. Instead I have to hunt through my task bar/docky to find the application providing the notification and click on it in order to respond to the notification. Why can't the notification system make it easier to deal with notifications?
To me, it feels like Shuttleworth thought some growl-like notifications would help spruce up the system and implemented it half-assedly without really considering how people want to use the thing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Growl works how you describe. It's one of the reasons I like mac so much and I'm really happy to see it in 9.04. I'm sure with time the notification system will be improved.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget putting said shitted-up implementation into an LTS just to make sure anything using 8.04 for the fact that it IS an LTS will have to suffer with it for the next three-to-five...
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:5, Funny)
Will it give me free beer and hookers?
Free as in speech, silly.
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:5, Insightful)
If we give you free beer, we'll get your free speech, whether we want it or not ;)
--- Mr. DOS
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure there are many people out there who would prefer that their OS gave them free beer and hookers instead of free speech.
Here's the option you're thinking of:
http://www.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com] :)
The hang over and viruses are included
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:4, Informative)
Do you make this comment everyday or something?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1208265&cid=27678699 [slashdot.org]
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:4, Funny)
WHAT!!! Ubuntu 9.04 Released? (Score:3, Funny)
You mean the charges didn't stick?
The courts are rigged!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's called "copy pasta [urbandictionary.com]"
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, he wasn't logged in, so this won't count.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because "insightful" doesn't mean "literally true".
Actually, insight - the result of apprehending the inner nature of things.
Note how it doesn't say anything about being literally true.
To clarify my point, calling a poster Ballmer doesn't necessarily have to be literally true to be insightful, it just needs for the idea of calling the poster Ballmer to provide some sort of insight. I'm not saying it did, but found your objection due to "lack of evidence" to completely miss the point of what insight is. A lot of nonsensical things are insightful. And a lot of very true things lack insight.
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Impossible, if you run Wubi. [wubi-installer.org]
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:5, Insightful)
I debate this every time it comes up. I run Linux full time on all my machines as my primary desktop. Sure, I have WinXP on the laptop, but haven't booted it in months. Why bother, it no longer meets my needs, and is too much a hassle to fool with
I've recently upgraded from Lenny to Kubuntu-8.10 w/ KDE4.2.2 and love the system. As soon as I get back to my broadband connection will upgrade to 9.04
The troll's post above is merely outdated FUD. It's the same as Linux fanboyz declaring that all windoz systems are Win95 and unstable abortions of crapware. WinXP is a nice system and the best OS M$ has ever produced. If it works for you, use it. If something about it bugs you, give Ubuntu a shot. This is all about freedom of choice. Linux has come into it's own and is an eye opening experience for those looking for something more than what windoz has to offer.
Jaunty (Score:5, Interesting)
Jaunty Jackalope may be the poofiest name for an Ubuntu release yet, but this is the first one since the Dapper Drake (Also quite poofish) to actually improve Ubuntu's stability. Unfortunately GNOME has boned the network manager (well, we got this one in Intrepid, it was extremely nonintuitive then and it's the same now, and it's still too retarded to handle bridging) and the gnome-panel which is now a mandatory application. Also the logout panel is now stupid, you can have logout options or shutdown options but you can't have both at once. Let's all hear it for Ubuntu for making the system more stable, and let's all give GNOME a big raspberry for their constant attempts to take GUIs into the last century. (KDE still looks like the kitchen sink exploded on my desktop... but anyway.) I do have one gripe, though: Will you guys please decide on a strategy for audio? I'm getting tired of having to follow PulseAudio's PerfectSetup document, why don't y'all try reading it sometime? Not that pulseaudio came with Jaunty; too bad audio didn't work right without it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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I already tried it and was already sorry. I run a million billion GTK+ apps so the major reason to run XFCE, not loading all those libraries, doesn't apply to me. I've tried Kubuntu too, just in case anyone was wondering. For all its faults, I still believe GNOME is the best desktop on Linux today — I just think it's headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps one day KDE will kill the clutter and then I'll switch.
Re:Jaunty (Score:4, Informative)
Except XFCE is GTK+ based, so you get those libraries loaded whether you run GTK apps or not.
Re:Jaunty (Score:4, Informative)
I already tried it and was already sorry. I run a million billion GTK+ apps so the major reason to run XFCE, not loading all those libraries, doesn't apply to me.
XFCE is GTK, so I don't quite understand what you're saying. If your apps just depend on the GTK libs, and not Gnome libs, then XFCE is a good choice for you.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, I meant to say GNOME apps, which would have made the whole thing much clearer. If you want the big high-profile applications they depend on more than just GTK+. Since I already have to use those libraries they might as well load at login time. I have removed gnome-panel which is one of the big drags on startup anyway; I replaced it with avant-window-navigator. You have to go fuck with the gconf in like three places in order to do this... GNOME sometimes makes me think it's an attempt to turn Linux in
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Gnome devs are working to move much of libgnome into GTK, so things will get better.
I just wish they'd work on making a nm-applet that works right (e.g. stays running) or a network config tool that's useful. We keep getting new network tools from GNOME instead of incremental improvements which actually help the user, and they always suck.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please NO. I hope KDE never ever ever kills that, what you call "clutter". Because we people, who tend to *really* *use* their computers, and configure them, hate one-button apps with so configurability at all, and everything at a default that is just riiiiight... for retards.
In my eyes, the only problem you (non retard, but does not want to configure every shit) users have with KDE, is that you are forced trough huge configuration menus.
I think it's very easy to make everyone happy. Just separate the setti
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a power-user and a developer. I use the command-line for anything requiring *real* using of my computer. You can't beat command-lines with piping and scripting for *real* power-use, period.
For my GUI usage, I use Gnome because it looks nice and works well by default. There are certain KDE applications I use because they are better designed than their Gnome counterparts or have been around longer and have better functionality (Kopete and Amarok come to mind), but my desktop is Gnome with several Eterm
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I can see that.
I on the other hand, see the following as the ideal user interface:
A mainly keyboard drive, command-line-like GUI system. Something where you have all the power, and can see the available options before selecting one (the major flaw of the command line). And with good (learning?) presets, so you only have to define non-default settings.
I would like to see something like that. No matter if it's called Gnome or KDE.
But having many concurring groups almost always has many benefits.
Everything
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh, as an old-school Mac user, I don't buy any of that.
Whether you use a CLI or a GUI program has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are a power user or not.
Our database expert here at work is definitely a power user, and she uses a GUI program to manage databases-- gasp! Horror! The digital film editor mentioned originally is more likely than not pushing his hardware to the absolute limit-- he's a power user, doing a job that can't be done on the CLI. Or consider a 3D modeler for a video game, or mo
Re:Jaunty (Score:5, Insightful)
That'd be the hell of a GUI. According to a quick check, mencoder has about 385 possible options. A GUI that presents all those options would be incredibly complex.
At that point, IMO, a CLI interface wins by far. Why?
1. In a GUI with 20 pages of configuration with 20 options on each it's very difficult to find the current configuration state. Meanwhile on the commandline it's obvious which of the 400 options are being used.
2. Regardless of how pretty you make it, the fact is that mencoder is a low level tool, which requires understanding video concepts to use effectively. A GUI for all its features isn't going to clarify things by much.
3. Scripts are easier in a CLI environment. Telling people to check this and that option is very tedious for something with such an amount of options, and following the instructions is equally bothersome. Plain text that can be copy/pasted is a lot more convenient.
4. Why put a GUI on a tool that can be used for batch processing work? What if somebody wants to encode videos on a server, with no GUI installed?
5. Who would use a full GUI adaption of mencoder anyway? It wouldn't make it much easier for normal people. Now a GUI with a more limited purpose, such as a GUI to transcode video to the format portable players want is a lot more limited in scope, needs much fewer options, and in fact has been done already.
6. This seems like a pointless discussion anyway, since we have the best of both worlds already. For those who want scriptability, there's mencoder. For those who want a GUI there are multiple frontends for it. It's the same as burning CDs, K3B is a frontent for cdrecord, and that seems to work just fine.
Re:Jaunty (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many people such as myself who have used plenty of window managers and desktop environments, and who like them to mostly stay out of the way. I don't want to endlessly configure my shiny little windows. If I want to do "real work", then I'll open up a terminal window and use Bash or Python. I'm sure there are plenty of other Slashdotters who take this same approach, judging by the relative popularity here of Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu.
And really, if you're obsessing about features in your GUI, are you really doing "real work"? The people I see who really care so much about that stuff are often just geeks who like to sit in their rooms and tinker with Linux, not people who are actually doing programming or sysadmin work on it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a good argument against "customize only" desktops (if there are such things). Sane defaults and minimalist interfaces don't exclude highly customizable software.
I love freedom and competition but I think KDE vs GNOME vs XCFE is a net negative for the FOSS comunity, fortunately you can mix and match.
Re:Jaunty (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be tempting to try the Netbook Remix as an alternate desktop( session type ). Putting all that wasted space in the title bar to use is a great idea. Using Kubuntu, you'd gain another 40*(screen width) pixels across the bottom of the screen and twice that if you were using standard Gnome-based Ubuntu.
Anyone tried `sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-remix` yet?
LoB
Re:Jaunty (Score:5, Funny)
So the stability of a release is proportional to the campness of the name? Excellent, so the plan is...
1. Create a distro called Fluffy Fairy
2. ???
3. Profit!
Re:Jaunty (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Jaunty Jackalope may be the poofiest name for an Ubuntu release yet
That is probably why that isn't the name of the release...
Re:Jaunty (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole logging in/out/shutting down process in Ubuntu (Gnome, I guess) needs some major improvements, that's for sure.
If you share a computer with multiple people, what's the most common task you'll be doing in this arena? Well, suspending the session and logging in. Those options are not at all clear in Gnome. Not even close. Log out will close all of my applications (thankfully I know that, but a novice user from Windows will definitely be frustrated). The only thing I can do is "lock screen", but then someone else in my household wants to use the computer, they're first prompted with a password dialog for my user.
The whole damn thing is confusing, I think. Which is weird considering that Gnome is supposed to be all about usability... there are so many usability problems with 9.04 I couldn't even list them all. I don't know whose grand vision Gnome is, but man, someone's gotta take the reign and really look at a lot of this stuff from actual users' perspectives.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's a panel applet that adds a menu to select what user should be logged in. If you've been updating an existing install since before this applet existed, then it might not be there, but by default on new installs it's in the upper left corner. You just click it, pick a different user, and then they type in their password.
(of course, I don't bother with separate user accounts on my systems, but the feature is there).
Obligitory (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]! It's got KDE 4.2 now!
Re:Obligitory (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah no one cares.
Re:Obligitory (Score:5, Funny)
No one Kares.
Re:Obligitory (Score:5, Interesting)
Annoyed as I've been at the incompleteness of the various distros' KDE offerings lately, I will dutifully try each release, including Jaunty, if only to see whether anything is horribly broken, and whether I can reliably work with a KDE 4 desktop.
Last time a Kubuntu came out they broke metadata, at least for JPEG images, so all the photos I manipulated in the shiny new Gwenview lost their dates, orientations, and so on. Not the end of the world, but it was an annoying bug.
I'm endlessly impressed by KDE's efforts, but the distros totally jumped the gun on the new architecture. The community (even most people in this crowd) totally grokked the idea of "4.0-as-API-freeze" but the distros throught 4.0 meant time to upgrade, and frankly they should have kept 3.5 as the default until the 4 series was truly ready. But again, I'll try it out. Amarok 2 is supposed to be a fantastic music player.
Re:Obligitory (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm endlessly impressed by KDE's efforts, but the distros totally jumped the gun on the new architecture. The community (even most people in this crowd) totally grokked the idea of "4.0-as-API-freeze" but the distros throught 4.0 meant time to upgrade, and frankly they should have kept 3.5 as the default until the 4 series was truly ready.
I think Kubuntu got stuck a bit with the KDE versions. Kubuntu 8.04 couldn't be LTS, because KDE 4 was definitely not ready, and the KDE developers couldn't promise 3 years of support on KDE 3. I think Kubuntu 8.10 may have been in a similar situation, where the KDE developers didn't plan on supporting KDE 3 for the time that Kubuntu 8.10 is supported by Canonical. With KDE 4.2 working well, Kubuntu 9.04 should be in much better shape.
Re:Obligitory (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, with Qt 4.5 (which is snappier than Qt 4.4, the "official" Qt for Kde 4.2).
Re:Obligitory (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been toying around with KDE 4.2 and I've ended up with mixed feelings about it. It seems like a usable environment - far better than the 4.x version that Ubuntu infamously shipped earlier. And there's certainly a nice sheen of polish and flash. But I also get a feeling of "clunkiness" with this new release that wasn't there on my olde KDE 3.x environment. And I can't say that I'm a fan of the direction the Konqueror filemanager has taken (seems like Nautilus for KDE).
What ultimately had me going back to Gnome (and Compiz) was playing WoW. For some reason, WoW (and Ventrilo) will lock up with a repeating loud sound at seemingly random intervals. This happened on KDE3.5 on very rare occasions in the past - I suspect when I had Flash running in another desktop. But with KDE4.2 it happens a lot more often. No clue why. But it's not happening in Gnome.
KDE is going in an interesting direction. I'm a fan of flash and change so this has some appeal to me (otherwise I'd use one of these minimalist windows managers that keep getting mentioned in these types of stories). But it strikes me that the KDE folks are taking one of those bold steps that tends to risk everything. I hope it works out.
I'd definitely recommend people give it a try; see if it works for them. Unless you have a KDE3.x desktop that you're really happy with and cringe at Gnome's apparent design philosophy.
Kubuntu is KDE4.2? Thanks for the warning! (Score:3, Insightful)
So, I'm a die-hard KDE user. I'm all excited about the new release! I can't wait to upgrade to a KDE that's actually useful as opposed to the get-lost-this-is-for-developers-only version. So I check out the release web page [kubuntu.org], and I see that there are a few known issues here:
Just installed ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just installed ... (Score:5, Funny)
newer GCC?
Nope, they just added -O3 to the compile options :)
Re:Just installed ... (Score:4, Funny)
Netbook Remix 4 EeePC 900? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Netbook Remix 4 EeePC 900? (Score:4, Informative)
Use eeebuntu instead - no problems at all with wifi (unlike with the stock Xandros POS).
Apparently they're working on a new version based on 9.04.
http://www.eeebuntu.com/ [eeebuntu.com]
Re:Netbook Remix 4 EeePC 900? (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone else try this with an Eee PC 901?
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I can't answer for the 900, but I've got netbook remix loaded off the install key on my 901 and it is doing fine so far. WPA2 wifi connectivity looks a heck of a lot better than in easypeasy or with the older array.org kernel/modules.
Re:Netbook Remix 4 EeePC 900? (Score:5, Informative)
"Other thing I love is how the 3G support is amazing. No more messing around with ppp or weird vodafone apps, just plug the dongle in, pick your network and go. Really smooth."
Brought to you mostly by the fine Dan Williams of Red Hat: http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/ [gnome.org] , http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/log/ [freedesktop.org] .
(disclaimer: I work at RH too).
Happy Ubuntu-Day, everyone! (Score:5, Informative)
I just came from IRC (irc.freenode.net #ubuntu-release-party). It's like the Times Square New Year Party in there.
On the clock at about 1 pm GMT, the Ubuntu website was updated, and the servers at ubuntu.com were immediately IRCdotted.
And now, we're going to Slashdot Ubuntu.com as well!
Get your torrents at
http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/ [ubuntu.com]
Re:Happy Ubuntu-Day, everyone! (Score:5, Funny)
Intratube Police: A .torrent? Why, this must be a pirated version of "ooh-bun-too", whatever that is. You, sir or madam, are a CRIMINAL and will be put in jail with RAPISTS and BABY KILLERS!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there a torrent anywhere of the netbook remix? I'm downloading that from Canonical UK at the moment and it's not exactly quick. There seem to be torrents for every other release, but not that one. Oversight?
Please.... (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, can we get an Ubuntu icon yet?
This release is awesome, I've been running it on my laptop, desktop and work PC for some time and it's been rock solid.
That said. There is one VERY VERY annoying thing that changed in this release. The update notification icon is no longer there unless you fiddle around with gconf. Instead you are treated to an automated "pop-under" launch of the full update manager window once a week unless it's a security update in which case it's 2 days. I dunno if this behavior has changed recently but that was the design a few weeks ago.
So that means:
a.) You probably wont know about feature/bug updates for a week.
b.) You probably wont know about security fixes for 2 days (even if it's urgent)
c.) You will get a window appear out of nowhere behind all your current windows launched seemingly by itself (yeh coz that's not gonna scare Windows migrants)
What a great idea! NOT!
P.S if you wanna revert to the old behavior, run gconf-editor. Go to apps->update-notifier and uncheck "auto-launch".
When does it stop becomming better? (Score:2)
At some point computers will be good enough, that it will be more work to upgrade it than it is to use it.
Ubuntu really is becoming quite easy to use - still some wackiness with 64 bit computing, and Flash, but otherwise pretty dang easy.
Better luck next time. (Score:2, Interesting)
Fix the intel graphics bugs yet? (Score:5, Informative)
I realize it's mostly the fault of Intel, but it would be nice if the modern (2 years old) Intel chips worked well with Linux.
I went with Intel instead of Nvidia in my laptop so I would have a more stable computer than using the binary blog nvidia provides. (and I don't game) Boy, had I known Intel would totally drop the ball I would have went with Nvidia. Ubuntu doesn't seem to be interested in pushing the issue at all, saying 'it's an upstream problem'. I got burned the same way with the g400 and it's so called open source drivers a decade ago. It took them almost 4 years to get them out the door, and they sucked when they were out.
It's a real sad the best video support on linux is from closed source nvidia drivers and their competitors don't even care.
Check out the list: https://bugs.launchpad.net/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bugs [launchpad.net]
So, back on topic, does anybody know how horrid Intel video is in this final release? I need to decide if I'm going to upgrade or not, last I heard it's even worse and locks up after a few minutes. I have an x3100/GM965.
Re:Fix the intel graphics bugs yet? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been using Linux on integrated Intel chipsets since the i810 driver came out and I have no complaints.
I had no complaints with the i810, the i815, the i915, the G33, or the G45 that I currently use. There was one Ubuntu release where the resolution setting didn't match the documentation, so I had to enter some manual stuff into xorg.conf, but before and since then, things have been gravy.
A lot of these bugs look like they're for things that I can't give good marks to -any- drivers, like switching displays on laptops, enabling compositing on ancient chips (really?! why bother!) and other foolishness.
Really, Intel doesn't make great 3D graphics chips, everyone knows that. If you actually want fast 3D, pick someone who fabs hardware that can handle it. The Intel -drivers- on the other hand, are hands-down the most supported and functional open-source drivers that I've used.
Intel not only releases the specs for their hardware, they sponsor the development of the drivers in a totally open-source-friendly way.
If you have complaints about 3D in Linux on integrated Intel graphics chipsets, you'll probably have the same complaints about 3D in Windows on Integrated Intel chipsets. Intel isn't in the mid-to-high-end market, they make excellent 2D chipsets that do 3D 'well enough' for casual non-gaming use.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you that this issue seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the release engineers, who pushed the 2.6 driver through despite its downfalls. (apparently to gain support for some newer chipsets, which could've been simply backported by adding PCI ID's to the 2.4 driver)
Compositing and 3D performance are horrid and even non-composited 2D is slow when EXA is used. Apparently, if you're lucky you can switch to UXA, but it is non-functional on my systems. (G35: no modes found & i915: DRI disable
I'm holding out for Ubuntu 10.10 (Score:5, Funny)
Which will undoubtedly be named Masturbating Monkey.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What about Misspelled Milipede instead?
Still Brown? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's new - the usefull and the not so usefull (Score:5, Informative)
Major changes:
The Jaunty overview [ubuntu.com] should be put on the main page of Ubuntu.com. It really is pointless making that page otherwise. Instead an Ubuntu tour [ubuntu.com] for 9.04 is the main link from the website. That tour really doesn't make Ubuntu sound like a very advanced OS.
Though I haven't upgraded to Jaunty as yet, I don't believe it is something the average user should get excited about. Karmic may.
Call me old but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And just about every "remix" of every good 80s song I've heard just slaughters it. Let's studder the vocals, make the intro about 3 times longer, and generally make it sound worse than the original. Then let's make it 100 times easier to find than the original track as well.
Microsoft snatches publicity crown from Ubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
In a stunning public relations coup, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MNPLY) has successfully overshadowed today's release of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 "Jaunty Jubblies" [today.com] by announcing its failed financials for a fourth quarter in a row and laying even more people off.
Microsoft announced new and expanded roles for remaining key executives as another several lesser, losing quitters deserted upper management. "It shows the fantastic opportunity available to everyone at Microsoft to climb seven or eight reporting levels up the org chart," said marketing marketer Steve Ballmer to pitchfork-wielding Wall Street analysts today. "If we haven't laid them off for making too much money or not kissing enough ass."
The Yahoo! deal is expected to go ahead. "We figure they'll go broke before we do. Probably." Mr Ballmer also plans to run the Yahoo! servers on Windows NT rather than FreeBSD after a similar change worked so well at Hotmail. "Some say synergy's another word for two plus two equals one, but you just have to make the value of one work for you."
Windows 7 betas have been greeted with remarkable positive press. "Of course, the betas preview the 'champagne and hookers' edition, which would be way too much for netbooks and explode users' brains. Imagine thinking those little things are computers! So we're releasing what we call Windows 7 Dumbass Edition. It lets you log in and look at the shiny. Even Spider Solitaire has the ribbon toolbar! And you can buy an upgrade to the version that runs programs! It lets you do that!" Dumbass Edition comes with pre-installed viruses to make the computer part of the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets. "If you can't beat ’em, join ’em."
However, Microsoft has indicated to its press corps, Microsoft Completely Enderlependent Analysts, to ixnay on the evensay and highlight the job openings for work on Windows 8, firmly penciled in for a 2012 release. Windows 8 will be optimised for low-end 32-core systems with a mere 16 gigabytes of memory — 28 cores for the interface, 3 cores for the DRM and one core for everything else. "Seven is just so this year. I hear they'll get $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM done next release for sure!" said ZDNet marketing marketer Mary-Jo Enderle. "It'll be awesome!"
"I'm sure it'll be fine, fine," said Bill Gates, upping his hours at his charitable foundation and scheduling the sale of several more packages of Microsoft stock.
Larry Ellison of Oracle, who recently purchased Sun Microsystems, merely snickered, muttered "Java. OpenOffice." and let out a long and resounding laugh.
Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, speaking from his castle on a crag high on a mountaintop in west London, was sanguine at Ubuntu's news being overshadowed. "I lost ten million dollars on Ubuntu last year. I'm losing ten million dollars on Ubuntu this year. I expect to lose ten million dollars on Ubuntu next year. At this rate, I'll be broke in ... sixty years."
I've been using this for a month (Score:3, Informative)
Jaunty Jackelope is certainly worth a download. I've been using it on my eeePC 900 with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for a month and while its got its shortcomings, overall its the best OS I'v used with my netbook.
The greatest plus is Ext4. I know that isn't an Ubuntu exclusive upgrade or anything (Fedora 11 is going to offer the option of installing to a Ext4 partition) but combine that w/ my SSD and I boot in like 23 seconds flat...I don't even bother "putting the pc to sleep" since I boot so quick, I just shut down.
The downfall that I found with this release, and Intrepid Ibex, is w/ the eeePC hardware and graphics tiling. Basically the kernal being used in the release candidate has some issues threading the graphics processing and you get signifigant and annoying lag in the UNR interface...but only there. If you open any app it runs as normal, but the UNR interface lags like a son of a bitch. A patched kernal update did fix this however that fix was reverted due to other issues and as of yet a new kernal patch addressing all issues has not been released. You and review the details of the bug here [launchpad.net]. The .41 kernal is what is shipping and the .40 kernel is what works w/ the eeePC. If you want to install your own kernel you can get the .40 here [launchpad.net].
The use of Ext4 makes this a true upgrade and a reason to install a new build. Enjoy!
Why a Server Edition? (Score:3, Interesting)
At least in my country and LATAM in general, I think the Server Edition only could thrive if Oracle Server can be certified at some time. As each day pass on, this looks more difficult.
In general, I fail to understand the Canonical offering of Ubuntu Server compared to CentOS/RedHat Servers (or even Suse).
Anyone else having trouble booting? (Score:3, Informative)
I tested the waters a couple of weeks ago by downloading the prerelease version of Jaunty as an iso and burning it to a live cd. My machine wouldn't boot from the live cd (started to boot, didn't complete the process). I don't have any trouble booting from a live cd of other versions of Ubuntu, and this machine currently has intrepid, which works fine. It's an x64 box.
Is anyone else having problems like this? I'm definitely chicken to upgrade if there's a risk of making my system unbootable. I'm all in favor of shorter boot times, but it does have to boot.
The impression I generally get is that it's a good idea to wait at least a few weeks before upgrading to a newly released version of ubuntu.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Mount the cdrom on a running system, cd to that directory and run:
$ md5sum -c md5sum.txt
It will check the md5sum of each file on the cdrom and report if anything is corrupted.
Just installed the RC the other day (Score:3, Interesting)
Too Much RAM for My PC (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Ubuntu on my Inspiron i8000 notebook since v6.04. But starting v8.10, the minimum RAM requirements nearly exceeded the 512 max RAM the notebook can hold. With a small app or two running it's right at 512MB used. Running Evolution or especially Firefox puts it far over, grinding the whole machine to a halt as it constantly swaps. To make matters worse, the nVidia GeForce2Go GPU doesn't seem supported by compvis, so the GPU doesn't offload the CPU for lots of graphics.
I'm hoping the 9.04 release now might possibly have some upgrade that relieves the RAM pressure. But I expect it will just get worse. Is there any simple way to trim the minimum RAM requirements of Ubuntu down below say 300MB (without losing GNOME)? Maybe if there's a simple way to convert the machine into just an X server to a separate faster box across the LAN, without saturating the LAN. Or maybe I finally have to kiss goodbye my 7 year old notebook and its fabulous 1600x1200 LCD.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny how you answered my question "Is there any simple way to trim the minimum RAM requirements of Ubuntu down below say 300MB (without losing GNOME)?" with "lose GNOME".
You're different from me. I use a computer solely in order to use the apps I want/need to use. If I have to choose between keeping a 7 year old computer or keeping the apps I use, I'm keeping the apps. Even if it costs me $500+ for a new notebook that's as good as or better than my 7 year old one.
First things first (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Could you please explain why we should do this? Are you so opposed to a particular programming language that you would remove software that was written in this language? Do you also not install programs that were written in C++, preferring only to use programs written in C?
And still no Eclipse update... (Score:4, Informative)
It is very unfortunate that the Eclipse package has been stuck at 3.2 [launchpad.net] in Ubuntu repos for several major releases already (the most recent version of Eclipse is currently 3.4.2). Given that Eclipse is one of the best FOSS IDEs out there (with only NetBeans being comparable - better in some things, worse in others), it is surprising that the effectively "#1 desktop Linux" can afford to alienate developers like that.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They announced they're changing the color scheme in the Jaunty+1 release.
Re:Still the same color scheme (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, too bad they don't include any other themes, or any way to change it. Someone should look into that.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You're probably referring to Dust [ubuntu.com], which isn't really a dark theme. There's also the Darkroom theme, but it's been around for a few versions now and it looks like ass.
Re: (Score:2)
7MB/s.... Wow. Just Wow. I was planning on grabbing them and seeding, but I never expected them to come this fast. Hopefully I can return the favor.
Looks like all the 'fat' lines are .se or .pl people. Thanks Europe!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Bah, I'd love to, but my ISP is throttling torrents. I'm lucky if I can get 5KB/s upload and 30KB/s download :(.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
The funny thing is, once you step outside the bubble that is slashdot, people are generally happy with Vista.
No, really, they're not. Try looking into the Enterprise world sometime, and take a look at just how many large organizations are migrating to Vista. I'll wait for you. Don't worry, you have enough fingers. At best people TOLERATE Vista. I've yet to meet anyone who's happy with it - most people's kindest praise amounts to "well, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting".
If anything, posts like your own re
Re:Ubuntu is unusable garbage (Score:4, Funny)
"If you like it better than Windows I'll eat my own ass."
I like it better than Windows. Do you need a napkin?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Are you saying you just changed "intrepid" to "Jaunty" in your sources.list and did a dist-upgrade?
If so:
You are an idiot.
Ubuntu understands that there are fundamental system changes that can cause an unbootable computer when you swap out core system libraries, and thus give you their upgrade manager. It handholds the system while it's in an unstable state.