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."
Obligitory (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]! It's got KDE 4.2 now!
Still Brown? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jaunty (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jaunty (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...
Sweet (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Jaunty (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Call me old but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jaunty (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 settings in "user", "advanced" and "expert" in a sensible manner, and (*very important*) choose the presets very wisely for your target group. (This has to be done by the KDE developers for the general default. By the distributors for their target group. And by a company admin for the people in that company.)
Then average people like you can still use it, and be happy, because it just works.
And we power-users can tweak it until it fits like a glove.
Or everything in between.
How about that? :)
Re:Obligitory (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? I was all excited when 8.10 came out, installed it ... then had to go back to 8.04 after a few days. Why? Simple. My existing desktop environment was unavailable in the "new" KDE (Keramic? Crystal? Which actually tells you the name?)
Sure, KDE 4 is all new, super-duper coding, but if I can't get my desktop to behave the way it has for years it's useless to me. I can't afford to spend a day or three learning a totally new desktop environment and customizing it to my needs. And when I say years, I mean back to the first release SuSE under the then-not-evil Novell bought it.
I don't care what the devs do behind the scenes as long as I can work.
/bleah
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.
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Notifications (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, for extra points show the notifications that occurred whilst unavailable when the user decides to be available again.
If any pidgin devs read this, here's another idea, silently ignore people who send urls to you without being on your contacts list. Bot-Sentry has its heart in the right place but tends to insist on telling you it failed to deliver a message to a spambot. thus providing all the annoyance without the porn scam links.
If instead you could filter out unknown contacts sending urls that would probably eliminate 95% + of all bot messaging. blocking all unknown contacts messaging isn't an ideal solution either.
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:Call me old but... (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.
Re:Jaunty (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 is relative. Without your counterparts you would no know how to define yourself. :)
Oh, and I hope I did not insult anyone with my GP comment. It's a bit harsh on the Gnome users. I hope you can stand over it, because I did not mean to attack anyone. There is no wrong or right, right? ;)
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:Notifications (Score:1, Insightful)
Time... Pulse audio is a newer feature in Ubuntu maybe introduced is 8.10 not sure but a few other distros have had pulse longer and less issues.. report bugs to ubuntu so they can improve.. Nothing wrong with pulse except the ways its implemented...
As for Flash.. Flash is proprietary its not free.. Now adobe is nice to have flash 10 beta for linux but its only beta and until linux market share is actually worthwhile im sure flash wont be a huge priority
Re:Notifications (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: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: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.
Re:Questions from an 8.10 user (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But will it upgrade? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Jaunty (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 movie studio-- same deal.
I think the reason Linux users think you "need" the CLI to be a power user is that most Linux GUIs kind of suck. Mencoder, though a GUI, would probably be just as powerful as the CLI version, if the GUI was good. Hell, at the bare minimum it could have help text to remind you what the hundreds of options are all for. Apple had GUI script-ability mastered back in System 7. (Although like a lot of good things Apple came up with in the last, they've flushed it down the shitter to be more compatible with other systems.)
There's nothing inherent in the CLI that makes it better for your tasks, and there's nothing stopping somebody from making a GUI application that would do just as well.
Re:Notifications (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:Too Much RAM for My PC (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.
Fortran 77 Support? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:First things first (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?
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: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.
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:
WTF?? Wireless doesn't work? Package manager doesn't work!? Kmail doesn't work!??
Okay, you may be saying, "It's not that it doesn't work, it's that certain functions with certain applications in certain circumstances don't work." Umm, but it worked before, and now with the newer version it stops working? Okay, network manager only fails to connect to some networks. I mean, who cares, right? As long as your network is not one of those "some". It only fails if the network is hidden. I mean, what's the infinitesimal chance that you would actually hide your network SSID, right? KPackageKit works some of the time!? I don't care if it's "most" of the time. How would you like it if you bought a product that worked "most" of the time?
It's not as if this is some bleeding edge version. It's KDE 4.2 already. And, sitting right next to it is a perfectly functional KDE 3.5 that people have been using for ages. Why Kubuntu being released with so many issues?
What were those Kubuntu distro managers thinking!? In an effort to find out, I browsed some bug discussion [launchpad.net] pages.
One person said:
"Maybe we should switch back to knetworkmanager as the default network manager because I don't think this problem will be fixed shortly. knetworkmanager doesn't look as nice as the plasma widget, but can handle hidden aps and works fine with kubuntu."
But another one says,
"This won't be possible for two reasons. First, the final release is only weeks away. It is way to late to make an intrusive change like that. Second, I have heard the developers say that there is no room on the CD left for the KDE3 libraries that would be necessary to run NetworkManager. Hopefully, KNetworkManager4 will have been released and/or the bugs in the plasmoid will have been fixed in time for Karmic."
Umm, so, translation: we have to use software that works "most" of the time instead of a perfectly functioning networking piece of software, whose only disadvantage is that it is not as aesthetically pleasing, because
This attitude of "yeah, it's buggy --we'll just get it out there, get some users to beta-test it for us (Surprise! YOU'VE been selected to beta-test OUR buggy software!) and just tell people to upgrade" makes me wonder whether the KDE developers are trying to update their resumes for a job hunt at Microsoft. "My software engineering skills include: successfully releasing piece-of-crap software and fo
Re:Notifications (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:And still no Eclipse update... (Score:1, Insightful)
Try complaining on launchpad, slashdot isn't the best place to be filing bug reports.