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Software Ubuntu Upgrades Linux

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Benchmarked and Reviewed 164

Posted by timothy from the pretty-snazzy dept.
tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware just posted an interesting review of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It includes an expanded set of OS benchmarks that they also performed on the previous LTS release (8.04), to see just how much the mainstream Linux distro has progressed in two years."
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Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Benchmarked and Reviewed More

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Benchmarked and Reviewed

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  • Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yvan256 ( 722131 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:23PM (#32351944) Homepage Journal

    Better than the previous version: Ubuntu 10.03 Irrational Lynx

  • For a moment I thought it's a GUIfied lynx. :P

  • Upgrading in place from the previous LTS? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:29PM (#32352030)
    is what matters to me... has anybody done reviewed that? all the reviews I've seen have been fresh installs...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      I upgraded from the last lts all the way up, but I did it as they come out. It worked for me. Mind you I was running Lucid alpha, I like to stay up to date.

    • Re:Upgrading in place from the previous LTS? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:37PM (#32352132)

      That is a recipe for tragedy. The operating system itself upgrades perfectly well, but the GConf schemas are subtly incompatible and the GNOME people couldn't care less about solving this problem. If you're going from Hardy to Lucid I highly recommend a nuke-and-pave install and copy your homedir from a backup, without any of the dotfiles.

      I had a great deal of mysterious behavior on my laptop that was upgraded to every Ubuntu release since Hardy, and all of that stuff disappeared when I reinstalled and got rid of all my dotfiles.

      • But it's a little bit in-between.

        I do a fresh install, but maintain my /home partition as-is. I make my regular username my default root-accessible (via gksu/sudo) one, but then once I've installed, I create a new user named after the release (hardy, jaunty, lucid, etc.). Then, I log into my default account. Using the icons on my desktop, I then install my non-standard apps (audacity, gimp, vlc, easytag, nicotine, etc.).

        Once I've basically got my computer up to where I was before, then I log into my version

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by advocate_one ( 662832 )
        oh dear... shades of the fun I had going from KDE 1.2 to KDE 2... I had to create a new user account and copy the config files across from there before KDE would load properly for me in my account... that was back going from Mandrake 7.2 to 8.0... oh happy days... praying the monitor detect wouldn't fry the monitor when setting up X.
      • I upgraded one desktop system from Jaunty -> Karmic -> Lucid in a single sitting without any issues -- though I then manually uninstalled all the social-media crap than comes with Lucid. That aside, everything went well.

        However, I have another system running Hardy, as my MythTV system, that I'm hesitant to upgrade as the "do-release-upgrade" program wants to install all the "recommended" software, meaning 850 more packages that I don't want or need (like GNOME), even with the "-m server" option. I

        • Okay, so maybe I'm being a bit of a nitpicker here...

          but do ANY of the Gnome/KDE folks use more than one machine? Because I do, and my home directory can be used on any number of different versions of Gnome/KDE and distros.

          Can't these guys figure out a way so that if I log into machine X, it doesn't bork the menu system because it has a config from machine Z?

          WTF?

          Hello, this is only a capability Unix/Linux has had since 1986/1993!!

          Yeah, yeah, I could write it myself, but what are the odds I alone would get

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        Yep, big upgrades suck. I did that a few years ago with Ubuntu. I don't remember what versions either. I rebooted, and it hung. :(

        I use Debian, and I can do upgrade parts. Even dist-upgrade work.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by alexhs ( 877055 )

        You don't need to go that far.

        You can simply remove your .gconf directory after the installation (of course, you will need to use the text console, or another window manager that handles updates more gracefully).

        I personnally remove .gconf* .gnome* .gtk*, just to be sure.

      • ...or you could just use 'gnome-cleanup'. (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        There's a tool for this; it's called 'gnome-cleanup':

        DESCRIPTION

        gnome-cleanup erases all GNOME user preferences, returning
        the user to the default look and feel. This can be used to
        undo undesired preference settings, or to correct the desk-
        top if the preferences become corrupt. The GNOME preference
        files are automatically recr

    • I did. It failed so nice :) But it's a bliss to reinstall and then put /home and /etc stuff back to its place.
    • Yes, this is something that really should be a central part of the review. The only possible reason (apart from scoffing at how crude and unevolved the older version is) for comparing Ubuntu 10 with 8.04 is to quantify the benefits of migration. Since it appears to be impossible (without a backup, wipe, virgin install and then days spent rebuilding all your customisations and apps and settings) there should at least be a ote to that effect.

      Since the only major performance improvement is from going EXT3 -

      • i'm no EXT expert, but isnt EXT4 basically EXT3.1? perhaps it is possible to upgrade a partition in place to EXT4 (might require unmounting etc..)

        This is probably far beyond the average ubuntu-user, but a small automated script on next-boot could handle this...

        As for forgetting about 8.04 users, ubuntu is like that, short sighted bastards...

      • what's really amusing is that they push the LTS as suitable for business users (even selling support packages) and people are going to be really upset to discover that to go from one LTS to the next requires a nuke and repave!!!

      • Since the only major performance improvement is from going EXT3 - EXT4, there's no point in even trying an "in place" upgrade. It's a gaping hole in Ubuntu's release and something you'd'a hoped someone would have considered. I wonder why they forget about us 8.04 users?

        Since most of the performance benefits of ext4 can be had by mounting ext3 as ext4, I wonder why you're bitching about this when it would take less time to edit your fstab?

        Nobody forgot about you, there's no tool as yet to convert an ext3 fs into an ext4 fs. And even if there was, if it failed they'd have summoned satan all over your data, and alienated everyone who is allergic to backups. Better to just force the issue. If you have an external hard disk larger than the partition you have to remake, it's fa

    • Re:Upgrading in place from the previous LTS? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @03:46PM (#32353034) Homepage

      Yes.

      Cupsd will utterly fail.

      you need to re-issue....

      sudo apt-get install --reinstall cups

      to get it working again.

      • I didn't have this problem, prior to the upgrade I had trouble printing PDFs too, it would print one page every five minutes, boy was that annoying, not on 10.04 it just works. I did have to reinstall the printer however.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Lumpy ( 12016 )

          you were lucky. 7 out of 7 pc's I upgraded from 9.10 to 10.04 had this problem. All did use HP printer drivers... This could be a cause. All I know is that there is a LOT of people on the net that have the same problem. and it's a brain dead simple fix.. force a reinstall of Cups.

    • Last Saturday I was really bored and got around to updating my acer Aspire One N270, netbook running 9.10. I was watching the upgrades when I noticed the Ubuntu 10.04 install button, so, bored, I did what my dad would do and clicked on it. It took 5 hours to complete and so far I've had only the one painful issue. Mauve, really mauvy purple with white shinny highlights. What's next? brightly coloured ponies and unicorns? I run a lot of stuff on my little netbook and so far so good. Maybe Ubuntu has become t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sideshow ( 99249 )

      I did this with no problems. However, I did it on a "server" type machine so I didn't have to worry about X, GNOME, etc.

    • I upgraded, using the Alternative install CD. There were a couple hiccups - the biggest of which is that my Slickness Black theme is somewhat borked. I don't need or want a "colorful" desktop, since I'm colorblind. Purple? That's my very last choice of a color scheme - can't tell purple from violet from lavender, or any other blue-red blend. But, the system works fine. I was surprised that the upgrade downloaded a few hundred meg of data during upgrade, despite the fact that the CD image was mounted,

  • A solid review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:34PM (#32352106)

    I never read Tom's any more, but maybe I'll start. I appreciate that they tracked down the cause of a performance regression between Hardy and Lucid. The only other site that routinely benchmarks Linux distributions is Phoronix, and those guys are prone to just throwing weird results out there with no explanation. The number of inexplicable, unrepeatable benchmark results posted over at Phoronix is huge and ever-growing. This benchmark from Tom's is much more useful.

    • Phoronix is great for information and their benchmark suite is excellent but, I agree that their benchmark results have to be taken with a grain of salt. I actually have a feeling that the reason their benchmark results are so dubious is actually *because* they have such an easy, automated benchmark suite. They just run the benchmarks, it generates a webpage and they annotate it. Some of my specific gripes with their benchmark results are:

      1) Declaring a winner on very small margins. Unless you are activ

  • It's working quite well under VirtualBox (Score:3, Informative)

    by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:37PM (#32352136)

    I have four Guest Instances of 10.04 running alongside 9.10 under VirtualBox 3.2, no problems to report. You can see the difference especially in responsiveness vs. 9.10 in terms of app startup, system shutdown/startup and the GUI is definitely more polished. I did like the old "Human" motif better with 9.10 but for what I'm using it for, it's been solid.

  • I'll wait until Linux Mint [linuxmint.com] makes a release based on ubuntu:

    I've been recommending it to friends as a nicer, friendlier, greener (yes, it's also Irish) Ubuntu that is not shy about providing support for proprietary video drivers and Adobe flash out of the box.

    mint green > aubergine

    I still run Debian testing on my primary box, though.

    • I have to agree that Mint is a pretty easy to use distro. I had no idea the founder was Irish. :)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      Ha, I didn't have to wait long... Linux Mint 9 (based on Ubuntu 10.04) came out of beta last week. And I've still been installing new machines with version 8 since then :-P

      Well, thanks for the reminder!

  • Reset Gnome (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Das Auge ( 597142 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:42PM (#32352200)
    I did an upgrade and had almost no problems. I did have to re-config grub2 to dual-boot into Windows-7.

    After a couple of weeks, I did something that made my bottom panel disappear. I couldn't get it back, so I deleted my .gnome and .gnome2 folders. Holy cow, did that make a difference. The windows became so much more responsive and features that I didn't have, appeared (I can't remember what they are off the top of my head). So if you are having any problems with GNOME, delete those folders and enjoy. Keep in mind that you'll need to reset all GNOME-related settings such as the desktop picture, panels, and such.

  • Given the recent work on the integrated Intel graphics drivers it would have been nice to see some benchmarks. My impression is that it is better, but it would be nice to have some numbers.

  • i like how they just fucked with it until the unigine tropics benchmark finally made sense.

    like the average person is going to know anything of the nvidia driver version and tweaking the compiz fusion config.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by oatworm ( 969674 )
      Right, which is why they did it. The average person will see that it's slower, grumble in frustration, and walk away. Tom's Hardware, on the other hand, went the extra mile, dug into the bits, figured out what the problem wasn't (Nvidia driver), figured out what the problem was (Compiz), then explained how they fixed it.

      • the antithesis of the "out of the box" experience test.

        if 8.04 had been given a thorough optimization, it would have been faster too.

  • Hope they fixed sound (pulseaudio). (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    On my laptop the headphone jack sense was broken in 9.04 (jaunty) in various ways -- the internal speakers wouldn't mute when the headphones were plugged in or sometimes the internal speakers would go from muted to on after listening with headphones for ~10-20 minutes. IIRC from the help forums, there was a problem with how the developers built the package. I couldn't be bothered to try compiling the sound system myself since I could get by not needing realiable sound. Anyway, I'm looking forward to trying

  • Intel Video Finally Working Well (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SlashdotOgre ( 739181 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @02:55PM (#32352374) Journal

    For the last several releases, Ubuntu has dealt very poorly with Intel video cards. Now to be fair, this isn't entirely their fault; they were impacted by the switch to DRI2, GEM, Modesetting, etc. However they haven't handled it gracefully. I have three systems -- HTPC (Dell Studio Hybrid), laptop (Lenovo SL400), and a netbook (Acer Aspire One) -- that use the i915 driver, and both 9.04 and 9.10 were horrible (no 3D acceleration, poor 2D performance, etc.). In fact 9.10 (and possibly 9.04) required me to pass a kernel parameter to disable modesetting (i915.modeset=0) to even get to a GUI to install.

    I realize there were workarounds and hacks, to get reasonable performance from the Intel cards with the previous two releases, but nothing I found seemed simple or fully addressed the issue. This was largely due to some of the fixes requiring newer kernels and since Ubuntu isn't a rolling release distro, that would make fixing things much more difficult. My personal laptop (T400, also with a i915 video card) runs Gentoo, and I had fixed all the Intel video issues several months earlier.

    Fortunately 10.04 seems to have gotten everything back to working well again, and hopefully all the changes will be worth it in the future.

    • Actually there were some last-minute commits that screwed up those of us with Intel "Ironlake" graphics. Users of the ThinkPad X201 unfortunately need to pass kernel parameters to the live cd and must patch their kernels to make the installed system work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      For the last several releases, Ubuntu has dealt very poorly with Intel video cards. Now to be fair, this isn't entirely their fault; they were impacted by the switch to DRI2, GEM, Modesetting, etc. However they haven't handled it gracefully. I have three systems -- HTPC (Dell Studio Hybrid), laptop (Lenovo SL400), and a netbook (Acer Aspire One) -- that use the i915 driver, and both 9.04 and 9.10 were horrible (no 3D acceleration, poor 2D performance, etc.). In fact 9.10 (and possibly 9.04) required me to p

    • My Acer Aspire D250 (GMA950) went from working (without compiz) on 9.10 to overheating and locking up all the time on 10.04. From where I'm sitting, Lucid breaks intel video. I actually went back to XP on that machine because Ubuntu has never provided a satisfactory experience, and still doesn't. Also, I would like Ubuntu to stop trashing the ATI video built into the R690M chipset in my Gateway netbook, but I don't know if there's any distribution that works properly with that hardware. I may have to revert

  • Insanely impressed with this release. (Score:5, Informative)

    by ebbomega ( 410207 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @03:00PM (#32352430) Journal

    #1 feature that has me blown away: full iPod Touch/iPhone support in Rhythmbox, without jailbreaking. Seriously, this was the one thing that kept me from buying an iPod touch for so long... I eventually decided to just bite the bullet and find _SOME_ fix that works... ultimately going with just using iTunes within Virtualbox. But then I hooked up my iTouch after upgrading to Lucid and was about to go launch Virtualbox and test that was still working fine... but saw my iTouch, with its designated name, listed in Rhythmbox....

    I'm sitting there going, "No.... they didn't...." so I try to drag one of the songs in my library over to my iPod.... and boosh! They did!

    Only problem I found though was that when I moved a couple tracks over that had "Unknown" as album title, it actually made everything else with "Unknown" as the album title inaccessible on the iPod. seems though this only has to do with stuff that was added via iTunes... so if I remove the song and then re-add it in rhythmbox, it's perfectly fine.

    It's a bit of a weird bug, but easily worked past, and now means that I no longer need to keep going into Windows/iTunes to load stuff onto my iPod. Great jerb!

    Also, while I'm not a _huge_ fan of the new default theme (window control buttons on the right pls) I did end up picking one of the new themes that suited my tastes, and I honestly am not looking back at all. I keep saying this every time I upgrade, but best linux yet.

    • I still have a problem with this. While RythmBox supports copying files to/from the iPod just fine in this release, it doesn't have a sync function. If you want to move a file from the computer to the iPod, or vice versa, then it's a drag and drop afair.

      Better than nothing, but I still prefer being able to plug in the iPod before I jump in the shower and have all my music purchases from the night before as well as any new podcasts transferred over before I dash out the door for work.

      That feature alone is

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SEAL ( 88488 )

      window control buttons on the right pls

      gconf-editor
      apps->metacity->general
      button_layout=:maximize,minimize,close

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SEAL ( 88488 )

        er sorry, make that :minimize,maximize,close

        And then log out/in or restart X or whatever.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SwedishPenguin ( 1035756 )

        I don't see why Gnome must necessarily hide this sort of stuff in an obscure gconf setting. It's almost like Microsoft and the obscure registry settings.
        In KDE, you right-click the title bar->configure window behavior->windows->buttons, and you can drag all the standard buttons and a few extra (sticky button, on top button, keeb below button, etc.) around the bar.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by SEAL ( 88488 )

          Agreed. Also if they're going to arbitrarily change something like this, after many many releases with it on the other side, they should present a dialog to let the user configure it during installation / upgrade.

        • It's just that nobody's programmed it to be user-friendly yet.

          Welcome to OSS. Don't like it, rewrite it.

  • Lynx Browser (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by c0d3r ( 156687 )

    Last time i checked, gmail is the only major web site that works with Lynx. I make all my AJAX web applications Lynx compatible, and you should too. Any word on when lynx is going to support Java applets or Flash swfs? I can't wait until they release Duke Nukem Forever.

  • In general, and for me, Canonical has released the best version yet. Hopefully it will continue to just get better.

  • Hey (Score:3, Informative)

    by mewshi_nya ( 1394329 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @03:06PM (#32352494)

    I've noticed it to be running a little faster than 9.10 did, on my Lenovo IdeaPad S10... so... looks good :) And this is with all the bells and whistles turned on.

  • It beats the hell out of XP and that's good enough for me. Thank you, Ubuntu, you've made two aging/underpowered machines suddenly useful again.

  • I use the Kubuntu 10.04 version instead (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rick17JJ ( 744063 ) on Wednesday May 26, 2010 @04:17PM (#32353462)
    I use Kubuntu 10.04 which is the KDE version of Ubuntu 10.04. I installed it last week and it seems to be working perfectly. I chose the alternate install version of the AMD 64 version of Kubuntu 10.04. As most of you probably already know, Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop environment, whereas Kubuntu uses the KDE desktop environment. With Linux you get several choices in desktop environments.

    Being somewhat nervous about upgrading, I kept my old version of Kubuntu 9.10 and installed a fresh clean copy of Kubuntu 10.04 onto a different partition. That way I knew that I could always go back to my older version, if I needed to.

    I am one of the few people who insists on using different wallpaper for each of my virtual desktops. After installing Kubuntu 10.04, I had trouble figuring out how to get it to allow me to use different wallpaper for each of my virtual desktops. The way to enable doing that had changed since Kubuntu 9.10. I eventually found how to do that by clicking "Settings," then "System Settings," then "Desktop," then "Multiple Desktops," then checking the box for "different activity for each desktop." After doing that, I went to each virtual desktop and right clicked on a blank portion of the screen and then selected the "Desktop Activity Settings." I chose my favorite wallpaper from there.

    I don't care very much what default software they include with Kubuntu, since I know what programs I prefer and can quickly and easily download and install them for free from the official Ubuntu repositories. There are hundreds of free Linux programs available from the official repositories. I prefer to use Synaptic to download those programs, because it is an easy to use point and click front end for apt-get. I have not yet tried using KPackageKit instead, which comes already installed with Kubuntu. When I first installed Kubuntu 10.04, I used apt-get to download the Synaptic package manager, and then used Synaptic to install every other favorite free program of mine.

    I have been happily using Linux on the desktop for about 10 years now, but, I am not a computer expert. Kubuntu 10.04 seems to perform quite well on my several year old AMD 64 X2 4200+ computer. Unlike the earlier Kubuntu 9.10, I have not yet found any bugs or other problems with Kubuntu 10.04.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      I might have to try again. Upgraded from Karmic about a month ago when KDE broke in Karmic and it was still broken for me in Lucid. I'm currently using Gnome and hating it.

  • - NVidia drivers seem to sometimes flicker the screen for some reason. But then I reboot and t goes away. Then the next day it is back. Not sure what is going on with that.

    - iwl3945 driver does not resume properly after laptop suspend, about 50% of the time. If you encounter this, you have to do this sequence I have figured out with much experimenting

    - rmmod iwl3945
    - suspend again
    - resume again
    - modprobe iwl3945

    This seems to reset the card enough to fix the issue.

    • I'll second the iwl3945 issue, and it leaves my knetworkmanager applet telling me it's unmanaged. The ATI X1400 video driver seems to be buggy too... weird 16-bit-ish rendering on parts of the screen. It's all annoying enough that I'm typing this from Windows 7.

  • Ho hum another *buntu has turned up. It's version xy.z and it's called "Rancid Racoon" or something.

    Cue: "but my feature n doesn't do m" style comments followed by "upstream are wankers" etc etc.

    Later we get the "my filesystem was eaten by *buntu xy.z and I hate it"

    Followed by "Well I've upgraded from *buntu 0.0000000000001 incrementally to xy.z and it all works beautifully".

    Now substitute "*buntu" with any other pre packaged distro's name and this gets boring.

    I'm a pretty hardcore Gentoo user and we don't

  • I've done a test install, but I noticed there's a problem with Open Office where if I enable the quickstarter, Ubuntu won't shutdown! I have to right click the quickstarter icon and get it quit that way, and *then* the OS will shutdown.

    Also, no uber-important, but the same quickstarter icon has a white background. And before you say, "well that's because the new theme is dark", I currently use 9.10 with the New Wave theme which is also dark.
  • Page 11 [tomshardware.com] was particularly interesting: 3D game graphics are 33% slower in Lucid due to Compiz.

  • The free (libre) derivative of Ubuntu should not be left unmentioned: gNewSense [gnewsense.org].

    Even if you don't use gNewSense, their homepage can serve as a guide for hardware [gnewsense.org] shopping. They only list devices that work without non-free firmware or drivers.

    From their website:

    gNewSense is derived from Ubuntu, and thus has most of the same functionality. There are a number of differences though.

    • Non-free firmware removed from kernel in main*
    • Non-free firmware removed from linux-ubuntu-modules**
    • Builder, a tool to produce a dis

  • My upgrade to 10.04 broke stuff I've gotten used to working without issue.

    Flash in Firefox broke
    gxine broke
    MythTV broke, but I'm fairly certain that was at best peripherally related (MythArchive Plugin killed the frontend)
    Various other smaller but irritating issues

    This is obvious stuff that should not have happened, certainly not in an LTS release. Forgivable - I have upgraded every six months for several years now with very little issue, but definitely screwy.

    Pug

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