Ubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat, Now Available 473
teeks99 writes "The latest version of Ubuntu — 10.10, called Maverick Meerkat — has been released. This release contains new improvements, like an update to the Ubuntu One online service (with music streaming), Shotwell instead of F-Spot, the new Unity interface (for netbooks), and an upgrade to just about every piece of existing software. The announcement e-mail has more details."
Any good? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has anyone given it a good testing? I've noticed a horrible trend that Canonical tends to rush their releases these days, especially today. Trying to hit the 10/10/10 deadline makes me wonder what they've left broken to meet their target date.
10 Years On - The Dream Is Dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Over the past year or so it has become clear that even on heavy open source/Linux focused sites like Slashdot that the fanatical enthusiasm for desktop Linux that existed throughout the 2000s has mostly dissipated into a resignation that the dream is dead. OS X continues to leave Linux far, far behind in marketshare in the consumer space. And Windows 7 has squashed the now unrealistic dreams from the Vista days that consumers would abandon Microsoft for Linux.
One just has to look at how Google took the Linux core and created a single stable set of APIs and development tools and have come to dominate the cellphone market in sales in just a couple of years and wonder what could have been with desktop Linux if it hadn't been for the juvenile license wars, API and desktop manager wars, and spinning cubes instead of real world usability that sums up most of the past decade of Linux development.
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are all these versions needed? (Score:0, Insightful)
Isn't it possible just to release these changes as updates instead of needing a new installation and reconfigure some options? Maybe the geeks out there are comfy with this, but I'm not an expert and updating my OS version sounds a bit frightening.
Re:10 Years On - The Dream Is Dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows 7 really has sucked the enthusiasm out of the push to get people to migrate to Linux. The huge amount of progress Microsoft has made with security and stability have left very little reason for the average home computer user to make a change.
It seems I got it last night (Score:5, Insightful)
I started when it went beta and every night since I finally got my upgrade ironed out (it took days before they got the package database in order such that you could actually complete an upgrade and not have packages trying to remove themselves) I've been doing
sudo at midnight
aptitude update && aptitude -y dist-upgrade
^D
Trying to upgrade today resulted in no updates, so I must be running final.
Let's see if they fixed the bluetooth driver they broke... nope. Failed to set bluetooth power. The error reported is: Connection timed out. Thanks for breaking the world's most common bluetooth dongle, dumbshits. I see testing is alive and well at Ubuntu... wait, no it isn't. And this bug was reported multiple times, including by me, before the release, but apparently replacing the working image manipulation software with one that uses a hardcoded directory for your library was more important than fixing bugs that they created since Lucid.
The market is ready for a Debian derivative that cares about stability and bugfixes. Ubuntu is like Wine, they break something every time they add new functionality and you can't trust that anything will continue to work through an upgrade.
Re:10 Years On - The Dream Is Dead (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be willing to bet that the only reason Windows 7 is any good is because of the competition from Linux. Even if you don't use Linux you still benefit from it.
Re:Any good? (Score:5, Insightful)
The upgrade was *flawless*.
I upgraded to the beta and I had to babysit the upgrade over about four days as they boned the package archive. LOADS of missing dependencies that caused the install to want to remove big pieces of my system, which it would probably have done with -y. You got very lucky, because my upgrades were painful. They did finally work though, and I am free of conflicts and unresolved deps... Now I'm just dealing with the bugs they introduced in this revision, like GDM not properly handling multiple monitors, or my one-of-the-most-common-models Cambridge bluetooth dongle no longer working. Well, bootsplash did vanish, and I never noticed.
It would also be nice if on fresh installs to flash media Ubuntu would automatically disable readahead. Readahead from a flash device accomplishes very little and doing it from a SLOW flash device will increase your boot time significantly, as the machine NEEDS to have something to do while it is reading from the storage device. Right now it seems like Ubuntu has nothing to improve but eye candy, and so they are doing this and don't care if they break anything in the process.
Re:early (Score:5, Insightful)
And there are 6 digits in 101010!
Wohoo! This proves how the world is all Determined by the Lord in all its greatness.
And He took 6 days to complete the Earth. And He saw that Ubuntu was good.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:1, Insightful)
at least linux has symlinks.
Re:It seems I got it last night (Score:4, Insightful)
The market is ready for a Debian derivative that cares about stability and bugfixes.
Why a derivative? Why aren't you just using Debian?
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:5, Insightful)
This comment reads as total BS.
Let me get this straight - you're running pre-release Ubuntu on 60 production machines? Where's your boss, I think he needs to have a talk with you (and show you the door). No IT professional would be caught dead doing that. Besides, let's be honest here - most accountants and managers "require" MS Office (or some other Windows-only software), and wouldn't use Ubuntu.
And what the hell are you saying about being built on Debian, which leads to professional and real-world experience, whereas Fedora doesn't have that? Have you ever heard of RHEL?
Parent comment is bunk.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you see the irony in your comment? You've tried to negate the predictable complaints about having to use the command line to fix something - by providing instructions on how to workaround a bug (it's a bug as far as I'm concerned) with a program that comes standard with Ubuntu now.
In other words, you haven't nullified the argument that Linux isn't ready for the desktop at all, because the workaround provided shouldn't even be necessary IN THE FIRST PLACE. No wonder people get tired of this shit. At least we have the choice to use another app I suppose
First, it's not a bug. It's a feature that doesn't exist that he would like to exist. There is a difference between a bug and a feature request.
Next, the reason use CLI stuff to explain something is because it's faster. The post describing how to do it via CLI was two lines long. The post explaining how to do it in the GUI was much more than that.
...because the workaround provided shouldn't even be necessary IN THE FIRST PLACE...
So every piece of software should do everything that everyone might want it to do?
This workaround offers a feature enhancement, not a bug fix, as I've said before. Can you explain how to get any number of windows, import photo applications to import to different folder? Is it even possible? Well, when you are done with your instructions, go ahead and answer the "because the workaround provided shouldn't even be necessary IN THE FIRST PLACE" you brought up because it didn't know where I wanted the images copied before I told it.
I'll take that bet and raise you ten. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be willing to bet that the only reason Windows 7 is any good is because of the competition from Linux.
Linux is scarcely a blib on the radar.
On the monthly Statcounter GLobal Stats [statcounter.com], Linux ranks lower than "Other." It is falling off the edge of the world.
What drives Microsoft onward is it's thirty year run with Apple.
Re:Changes seem irrelevant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the user-space changes seem irrelevant.
But, the kernel is worth the upgrade - along with some other userspace requirements that go hand-in-hand with the kernel.
For example, the (newer?) Xorg for using newer features from the graphics/drm drivers etc.
If you're running 10.04, none of your applications will know how to use any of these new Xorg features. They won't know they exist
The newer kernel gives you:
o. more h/w support (drivers moved from staging into mainline)
My hardware already works if I'm already running 10.04. Why would I need more hardware support?
o. newer filesystems (ceph anyone?)
Why does my desktop need ceph? Ext4 is plenty good for a desktop. If I'm running a server, why would I be changing the configuration of a production machine? Am I really going to be upgrading everything to ceph?
o. newer archs (tile is now included in mainline)
Whoo, now I can upgrade my x86-64 to a tile processor! This is the feature I needed!
- just to name a few reasons.
Granted I haven't checked what all is actually bundled, but if you can live with manually updating the kernel and the bits that go along with it, you can definitely stick with 10.04LTS provided you're not on paid support from Canonical which might get voided if you change the kernel.
As time passes by, the distro is bound to get into equilibrium - at which point, we can't expect major changes.
NONE of these reasons compel me to upgrade 10.04 a 10.10 on an already working, functional system. The only good reason would be if your hardware wasn't supported in the older kernel, but I'm assuming you wouldn't be using Ubuntu if your hardware wasn't supported.
The only thing left to care about is userspace changes, but it sounds like the userspace changes are minor.
Re:10 Years On - The Dream Is Dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:3, Insightful)
If he thoroughly verified that the software works for him and his users, then what's your point? Does additional testing and "yes, it's ready" sentence from Canonical, make any difference? It makes sense to wait for the release version if you don't have resources to do the testing. OTOH having tests concluded by Canonical does not mean, that you don't have to do any testing yourself.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare:
To
Which instructions are really easier to follow?
Re:I'll take that bet and raise you ten. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Any good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh my ; the article that you link shows that the most popular Linux distro ... has more negative articles online about it than the others. Who'da thunk?
If it showed that the ratio of positive articles to negative articles was different, that might be something, even if that might just reflect the relatively inexperienced user base of Ubuntu (because it's more popular, it's going to cover more of the bell curve of expertise). But it doesn't even try.
It does compare it to Windows. Surprisingly, negative Windows articles are more popular than negative Ubuntu articles. Way to go with that insight.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:5, Insightful)
The command line ones. They often can be copy-pasted, and are much more language neutral (though not so much in this particular case)
Language is a pretty big barrier for giving GUI explanations. For instance, I don't have my GUI in English, so if I were to try to explain this to somebody here, I'd have the problem of not knowing the exact name of the "Make Link" option. It could be "Make Symlink" or "Create Link" for all I know. But in the commandline, "ln" is always "ln", and the name of the Pictures folder is one of the very few deviations from that.
Re:Announcing ubuntu releases (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux Mint does a much better job at being easy-to-use right out of the box (and doesn't make stupid design decisions involving window buttons... cough cough).
How? All I can see is it is a reskinned Ubuntu with "restricted extras" and medibuntu installed. I tried it on my HTPC/Nettop and it was about as easy to use as Ubuntu, except with a dog-ugly and inefficient Windows XP menu. It did not live up to the hype. Yes, it was prettier, and yes it maintained Windows-style buttons, but this doesn't really matter since I still had to put in 30 minutes to make it custom.
The same thing I do with every other Linux install, no matter the distro.
I don't get the button debate thing. It takes all of a minute to change them around. Most people don't use the stock desktop/look, so how hard it is it to change your buttons at the same time your changing your themes/fonts/icons? Hell, I always set them to the left anyways, so it saved me work.
Compiz and Flash and the NVIDIA ION still didn't play nice, and it still doesn't do HDMI audio. (does anyone have an ION box that manages HDMI sound and fullscreen flash from Firefox/Chromium and the Hulu app? What distro are you using? Did it require huge amounts of tweaking?). Meaning it still made me wish my MacMini had actual graphics and not some strange Intel chip.
I keep meaning to give Fedora or OpenSuse a spin. But haven't had the time to dig around. Ubuntu has been annoying me of late. I feel like its yelling at me to "web2.0 moar!", with all its silly social networking features that are a slight pain to remove. Perhaps I don't want to use my computer for updating Twitter and Facebook, or chatting, or... making faux friends. Perhaps the two computers I have running Ubuntu are for tasks? When I think of mock social people, the first people I think of aren't Linux nerds. I also keep tossing around trying a newer version of KDE (I haven't used it since it stopped being a Win95 clone), just to see if Amarok is indeed good (better than its Gnome brotheren).
I don't get the hype.
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:4, Insightful)
If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine, and sort through for something that tells me how to do exactly what I want to do.
Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse. It is hard to accurately remember and type long paths in the command line, but with the GUI there is no chance for mistakes assuming you don't have multiple files with very similar names.
Of course it's great that the CLI is there, but usability is a lot better if a GUI option is available too.
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:3, Insightful)
I use RHEL5 at work. I hate it with the fiery passion of a million supernovas. It doesn't help that rhel5 is like six years old, and 5.4 isn't much better. Who else likes using a version of gedit so old it doesn't even have syntax highlighting? My hobbyist Linux development environment at home should not far outshine my professional Linux development environment at work.
While I agree that your parent probably shouldn't be installing pre-release OSes on production machines, I have to admit that given the choice between pre-release Ubuntu and RHEL5, I'd choose pre-release Ubuntu in a heartbeat.
Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you know that 68% of all statistics are made up?
-B
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:10 Years On - The Dream Is Dead (Score:3, Insightful)
One just has to look at how Google took the Linux core and created a single stable set of APIs and development tools and have come to dominate the cellphone market in sales in just a couple of years and wonder what could have been with desktop Linux if it hadn't been for the juvenile license wars, API and desktop manager wars, and spinning cubes instead of real world usability that sums up most of the past decade of Linux development.
No, the problem is in the techie delusion that something which is ONLY a core (Linux) can somehow be used to define & identify a complete, consumer-oriented desktop platform. There is no SDK for "Linux", hence it is hostile to application developers. There are no reference hardware implementations for the desktop. There is no official IDE that app devs can use to establish their footing on the platform. There is no corporate sponsor which takes responsibility for the delivered OS soup-to-nuts.
Android addresses these underlying issues. And note that ANDROID != LINUX. It is not "Android Linux" and its not marketed that way. People off the street do not ask for a "Linux phone" after they've seen a nice Android unit by ad or acquaintance, which I think you'll agree would be meaningless. ANDROID is the identity of the platform, and techies know that Linux is "somewhere inside"; there is no suggestion of equivalent or interchangeable identity there.
Here's the thing: Its just as meaningless to refer to "Linux" desktops for consumers. But even if the techies start to focus on Ubuntu or somesuch, not only is the identity still "Ubuntu Linux" but Ubuntu is still missing much of what makes Android appealing to consumers and app developers (see above). Shuttleworth thinks he's read the book on platform creation when he really only has a clue (and yes, I could expand on that subtopic).
When consumers are sucked into the "desktop Linux" arena, they find themselves having to learn about different GUIs/desktops, different distros, different package managers and formats, numerous FOSS standards that define internal behavior like filesystems, and industry standards they never had to think about before. Often painfully, they learn that Nvidia is the only well-supported gfx card, the OS will screw them over upper/lowercase differences, they must learn the shell to fix stupid system defaults, and they must pass-on helpful info in CLI form or else other "Linux" users (often people just using a different release of the same distro) will be lost. People who are more technically inclined eventually learn that X11 and audio are designed with the wrong assumptions, and even well-written CLI scripts will break every six months if they have anything to do with managing system features.
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me get this straight - you're running pre-release Ubuntu on 60 production machines?
I was running it on a few. It's a good way to discover if anything that I rely on needs fixing before the real release - bugs are more likely to get worked on when they are reported asap after being introduced. Plus the software itself isn't really pre-release; the actual software versions of core packages are usually considered stable upstream. If you are capable of handling problems yourself, and can accept small amounts of downtime (i.e. non-critical services), then it makes sense to run the development release of your distribution of choice on a few systems.
Re:It seems I got it last night (Score:5, Insightful)
It is exactly this kind of condescending elitism that is actively damaging the reputation of the Linux community. Click download. Burn download to disk. Insert the disk. Reboot. Click OK on a bunch of dialogs. Done. Canonical has its issues, but at least they understand that much. Your accusation cuts both ways:
"If developers lack the patience, attention span, or ability to produce an easier to use operating system or even proper download instructions, then perhaps they shouldn't be writing an OS to begin with."
Does that sound both obnoxious and arrogant? That's because it is.
Just because someone doesn't see something the same way as you, does not make them stupid. And before you accuse me of being some ignorant n00b for defending those who would dare to tarnish Debian's hallowed name, I've been exclusively using Linux as my main desktop OS since 1997, and yes, at one point that included Debian. Debian was easily the messiest install I ever encountered, and that includes Slackware. If Debian cleaned up their act a decade ago, there would be no need for Ubuntu. As it is, they're the same as the makers of DomainOS, probably one of the best UNIXs out there that died a horrible death because its developers were excellent at coding, and terrible at marketing. Ubuntu is the marketing Debian needs to remain more than a tinkerer's OS, and I'd say it's working so far. How many people cut their teeth on Ubuntu and then moved on to Debian because it's "real" Linux?
People don't just dive into using a new operating system, they need handholding at first and then can develop their skills as they grow into the system. But that'll never happen if they're belittled and ranted at the second they offer a difference of opinion or confusion at an admittedly counter-intuitive interface. Grow up. Or are you getting too old for that, too?
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:4, Insightful)
But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones.
Really? Using a GUI is a lot like going to the toolbox and grabbing a tool. Sometimes a tool gets misplaced and you're going to have to hunt for it. Words (like CLI commands) are always right there.
Sure, we've all had the experience where a word is right on the tip of our tongue and we can't think of it. But it's an uncommon experience, which is why it's remarkable. We all have enormous English vocabularies that we can call up instantly. On the other hand, most of us lose something every day. I've learned to keep the important things (keys) at hand, but I couldn't tell you where the swiss army knife I was just using is.
GUIs are the same way. When I use a GUI, I am constantly asking myself "ok, which menu was that command in?". With a CLI you never have to know where your commands are. Just speak the words and it is done. It's like a fucking magical incantation. That is what I call easy.
If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine
Search.. engine..? If you invoke 'ln' with no arguments, it tells you to use --help for more information. When you do that you get a nice list of options. It's all right there at your fingertips.
Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse.
That's what tab completion is for. This explains why you think the CLI is harder than the GUI. You're doing it wrong. The CLI has been around for long enough that it has tools to get around all these problem cases. The GUI is getting there. Features like desktop search are helping to solve the "where is it?" problem I described above. But, surprise, surprise, they do it by becoming more like the CLI.
Re:Shotwell instead of f-spot, almost Yay (Score:2, Insightful)
Which instructions are really easier to follow?
Which are complete? (Hint: where do I do this 'command line' thingy?)
Re:It's extremely good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll take that bet and raise you ten. (Score:3, Insightful)
Other might not necessarily be desktop operating systems. Infact, I have a feeling it's various smartphone devices, consoles, etc. Infact I'm curious how large part of other is Android, which is based on the Linux kernel (but is unlike any other Linux distro, and did fork the kernel...).
Considering the amount of computers around, I actually find 0.77% impressive since by those stats Mac is only "seven" times bigger than Linux. And Macintosh is widely advertised and have the whole brand thing, while there isn't much the case for Linux.