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The less common way is the most common one on Windows: you go to a web site, download the installer and follow instructions (usually unzip and run a setup script). The last time I did it was for SamIam.

The more common way is similar to what other companies are calling "a store": you open your OS package manager, search for the application you need and click to install.. On my Ubuntu it is Applications menu, Ubuntu Software Center. There is also a command line version very handy to perform long installations on servers (easier to document and maybe you have only a CLI anyway.)

A variant of the latter method is going to the web site of a company, find the name of their own repository, and add it to the software sources in the package manager. I did it to install duplicity from this repository. Then it's included in the package manager.

Most programs are for free, some are for purchase.

The "trademark issues" were that you can't patch Firefox and keep calling it Firefox.

You can if you have permission e.g. Ubuntu patch their Firefox, and yet it is still called Firefox. Debian also had permission, once upon a time. The dispute with Debian wasn't over source code patches, it was over the patch that removed the Firefox logo, because it was provided under a non-free license.

It does happen though, and quite severely. For example, roundcube got thoroughly busted on an upgrade when using sqlite:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/roundcube/+bug/900190

This may have bitten debian as well though, so I don't know if Debian fared any better (e.g. the last comment in that bug).

I just set up a new computer with Ubuntu 12.04. It comes with the latest Firefox.

I had assumed that an Intel Core processor with HT should be able to handle Firefox, but no: It repeatedly maxes out CPU and Ubuntu greys it out (signaling that it's unresponsive).

I struggled with this too, after updates took me to FF 12 a few days ago. Completely useless, click on tab: greyed out; click to scroll: greyed out; click to search: greyed out. Top showed 500MB more RAM usage over FF 11, with the same tabs and plugins (only Adblock and SessionManager).

Finally I gave up and installed FF 13 beta from the Firefox-next PPA and everything went back to normal - reasonable response and CPU load, RAM below 1GB. Either there is something wrong with FF12, or with Ubuntu's build, but it seems fixed with FF13.

Each distribution has a bug reporting/tracking system.

Yeah and they don't work very well. For example: makepasswd not generating random passwords, BGR subpixel rendering broken or
XFCE4 Volume Control issue. Tracking of bugs is all nice and good, but once they entered the tracker, very little actually happens to fix them. Even simple things like forwarding them to upstream isn't handled in any proper manner.

sudo apt-get install "software". What's the MS "superior" way of sharing software?

Stop thinking in boxes. Stop comparing Linux to Windows. If you go with the mindset: "Hey Windows sucks, so Linux can suck too". Of course Linux will end up sucking. Instead think about how to actually improve it, think about how to make a superior and more flexible experience. For software sharing that would mean making modification and distribution of modifications trivial. Take the OLPC with Sugar for example:

You want to see source code for an application, you hit Fn-Space, it launches an IDE and allows you to hack away. You want to share your modifications? In the neighborhood view you can see what your friends are currently running, wanna have it? Just double click it. It will transfer the software and run it. No extra work to package it required. It so simple you can explain it to a five year old.

Of course, for a full scale Linux distribution you might want something a little more complicated, with Launchpad or Github integration or whatever. But the point is that you want something that is easy to use. You want a package format that allows the user to get source access easily and an easy way to distribute his changes. You want something that gives the user actual freedom to do what he wants to do, not something that locks up that freedom behind walls and walls of different software, package formats and other complications.

Each distribution has a bug reporting/tracking system.

Yeah and they don't work very well. For example: makepasswd not generating random passwords, BGR subpixel rendering broken or
XFCE4 Volume Control issue. Tracking of bugs is all nice and good, but once they entered the tracker, very little actually happens to fix them. Even simple things like forwarding them to upstream isn't handled in any proper manner.

sudo apt-get install "software". What's the MS "superior" way of sharing software?

Stop thinking in boxes. Stop comparing Linux to Windows. If you go with the mindset: "Hey Windows sucks, so Linux can suck too". Of course Linux will end up sucking. Instead think about how to actually improve it, think about how to make a superior and more flexible experience. For software sharing that would mean making modification and distribution of modifications trivial. Take the OLPC with Sugar for example:

You want to see source code for an application, you hit Fn-Space, it launches an IDE and allows you to hack away. You want to share your modifications? In the neighborhood view you can see what your friends are currently running, wanna have it? Just double click it. It will transfer the software and run it. No extra work to package it required. It so simple you can explain it to a five year old.

Of course, for a full scale Linux distribution you might want something a little more complicated, with Launchpad or Github integration or whatever. But the point is that you want something that is easy to use. You want a package format that allows the user to get source access easily and an easy way to distribute his changes. You want something that gives the user actual freedom to do what he wants to do, not something that locks up that freedom behind walls and walls of different software, package formats and other complications.

Each distribution has a bug reporting/tracking system.

Yeah and they don't work very well. For example: makepasswd not generating random passwords, BGR subpixel rendering broken or
XFCE4 Volume Control issue. Tracking of bugs is all nice and good, but once they entered the tracker, very little actually happens to fix them. Even simple things like forwarding them to upstream isn't handled in any proper manner.

sudo apt-get install "software". What's the MS "superior" way of sharing software?

Stop thinking in boxes. Stop comparing Linux to Windows. If you go with the mindset: "Hey Windows sucks, so Linux can suck too". Of course Linux will end up sucking. Instead think about how to actually improve it, think about how to make a superior and more flexible experience. For software sharing that would mean making modification and distribution of modifications trivial. Take the OLPC with Sugar for example:

You want to see source code for an application, you hit Fn-Space, it launches an IDE and allows you to hack away. You want to share your modifications? In the neighborhood view you can see what your friends are currently running, wanna have it? Just double click it. It will transfer the software and run it. No extra work to package it required. It so simple you can explain it to a five year old.

Of course, for a full scale Linux distribution you might want something a little more complicated, with Launchpad or Github integration or whatever. But the point is that you want something that is easy to use. You want a package format that allows the user to get source access easily and an easy way to distribute his changes. You want something that gives the user actual freedom to do what he wants to do, not something that locks up that freedom behind walls and walls of different software, package formats and other complications.

Don't use SharePoint or CodePlex. Try this: http://github.com/ or this http://launchpad.net/ or this http://bitbucket.org/

And as a parting shot at Linux users, Adobe introduces a major regression (hardware accelerated video tints everything blue, e.g. YouTube), claims it can't be reproduced, and closes all bug reports about it, leaving users to implement a nasty hack individually.

Even better is the screen/tmux wrapper called byobu (https://launchpad.net/byobu). It puts a nice face on screen (and now also tmux) and greatly simplifies basic usage. It also has a large selection of status notifications that can be displayed on the bottom one or two lines of your terminal which show things like the current screens, load, time, etc.

The default key mapping uses the function keys for the most common commands. For example, F2 for a new window, F3/F4 for previous/next window, and so on. It provides a wrapper around the session handling as well, so that, in general, you can almost always just run "byobu" and get your session back or start a new one if there is none existing. And if it finds that you have more than one session running, it will ask you which one to connect to.

In the configuration menu (F9), the last item allows you to toggle auto-launching at login. Select it and it will add a line to the end of your shell's profile file to start byobu when you login.

Development has been proceeding at a very rapid pace over the past year and the feature set it quite nice. Recently, the default backend was switched from screen to tmux, but because byobu is a wrapper on top of those programs, I didn't need to learn a new set of keys... though it did help to read up on tmux to see what it could/couldn't do as compared to screen. For the most part, the change was transparent, though tmux only does one status line at the bottom of the terminal versus the two that you had with screen. One of the nicest changes is that tmux can determine what command you are executing in a window and it shows this in place of a window's generic title in the status line. Screen could do this too, but you had to jump though some hoops, change your shell prompt, and it didn't always work.

Anyway, with the additions byobu brings to screen/tmux, I always have it running which has the added benefit that in the (these days, not very likely) event of SSH dropping my connection, nothing is lost. I usually use it in local terminals too, so if X or my terminal ever crashes for some odd reason, I'm saved there, too.

You're trolling. The default on Ubuntu is brasero, which gives you the option to burn on the fly right in the dialog.

Next time, pick a less transparent lie.

Mart

Well and because it gives you the option automatically means it works 100% and has no bugs?

Quoting from Ubuntu Bug #774203:

If I try creating a CD by adding files in Brasero then buring directly to disk (using defaults all the way through) brasero creates coasters every time.

I destroyed several cd's before finding the workaround...for new ubuntu users it is deterrent that you cannot burn cd's...

This bug has been reported months ago and nothing happened since.

There's still a problem with Llano VGA in Linux 3.3. These bug reports seem to indicate that the problem lies with the DP to VGA bridge not working. As a workaround, you can use a HDMI/DVI connection instead of VGA.

I opened this bug back in 2011: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/778872 I've also fixed it now. See the patch: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/778872/+attachment/2836456/+files/stream-mem.patch

I opened this bug back in 2011: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/778872 I've also fixed it now. See the patch: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vte/+bug/778872/+attachment/2836456/+files/stream-mem.patch

THANK YOU SIR! It was AjaxTerm that lead me to develop Escape From The Web which was an HTTP streams-based predecessor to Gate One. If it weren't for AjaxTerm's example of how to write such an application I probably would've never gotten around to making Gate One.

So thanks again; Gate One wouldn't have been possible if you never shared your code.

That's why I use my Ubuntu account instead of my Google account when I want to log in somewhere with OpenID. Is Canonical likely to track me and do evil things with the information?

...ro [Limited amount of chars in the title, thank you so much, /.!]

And how we have all had our regular switching-your-distro-experiences over the last 10 to 15 years!
And how we were proud to have found the latest and greatest - multiple times!

Does anyone of you waste a second of thought on us; us who try to actually make it the "year of the Linux desktop" by rolling a distro and a DE out to a multitude of users?
Users who give a toss about new distros and yet new DE? Users who would love to stick to their distro and DE for the rest of their lives?
No wonder about this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1 It is mostly self-inflicted.

Hence this bug should be fixed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440

As I read the article

Frankly, you'd better read the Openstack dev list thread about "dead wood cutting" on launchpad, because that's where the article is taking information from (where else could this info be?). It has *never* been said that OpenStack is "ditching" Hyper-V by the way, but that it's just being removed from the Essex release, because it's currently in frozen state (currently only bugfix are accepted, until Essex is released), and Hyper-V isn't up-to-shape.

Just to let you know, I haven't forgotten. But I am trying to make the report useful.

What I'm doing is using the version ten release from http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-next/ubuntu/. The last version I downloaded, on Wednesday, has crashed when I left it (twice) alone for a couple of days with Twitter and Yahoo Mail tabs. I've reported those crashes via the bug reporter pop-up that comes up. I'm downloading the latest build now.

What I will say is that while the version of ten I had prior to Wednesday exhibited the "mush" issues I'm talking about, the one that's crashed twice hasn't. Which is why I'm holding off. It could be it's growing much more slowly and then crashing, or alternatively it could be crashing for some entirely unrelated issue and the mush issues I've been experiencing are fixed. I'll let you know either way, and file a bug report if the mush thing comes back.

Let me put it this way. I just had to kill and restart Firefox (FF9) because it went into swap hell again. I'm using it on a 1.5G Ubuntu VM (which may not be huge, but it's 50% more memory than a Netbook, and last I heard we're still supporting those, right? Also: when did a glorified rich text viewer start needing gigabytes to run?)

How many tabs open? About 15. How much memory in use at the time? It claimed less than a gig.

What mistake did I make? Actually, I've noticed that if I have more than ten tabs open, I can pretty much cause swap hell by starting (and closing) a PDF in Evince - which needless to say, happens frequently when browsing anyway. Somehow Evince loading is enough to injure Firefox, permanently.

I've just upgraded to the preview of FF10 via http://ppa.launchpad.net/mozillateam/firefox-next/ubuntu/. We'll see what happens. I'm not holding my breath, I've heard the "Oh, you're not running the very latest release" thing for a while now - I do upgrade, I still get the same problem.

Oh, and no problems with Chrome which has many more tabs open, but is still responsive.

The history and profile thing is a new one, but guess what: I don't want to lose my history, bookmarks, cookies, and everything else. If storing a user's profile is sub-optimal, perhaps that's something that needs fixing too?

we have MythTV, XBMC/Boxee/Plex, Freevo, Enna[..]How many of these me-too media center suites do we need ?

You forgot the GTK based TV Project me-tv or is it me-too-tv :)

Once fixed, date will act as expected (but the actual message will be date: invalid date `201112300000'), but not cal (cal will black the correct current day rather than yesterday, but still display the non-existent December 30th. The Gregorian fortnight in September 1752 is a hard-coded special case.) Just witness a similar case in Kirimati:

> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date -d @$((9131*86400))
Sat Dec 31 14:00:00 LINT 1994
> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date -d @$((9132*86400))
Mon Jan 2 14:00:00 LINT 1995
> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati date 010100001995
date: invalid date `010100001995'

==> date behaves as expected.

However cal shows a non-existent January 1st 1995:

> TZ=Pacific/Kiritimati cal 1 1995
January 1995
Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su
.. .. .. .. .. .. .1
.2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8
.9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31
(display garbled by Slashdot's lack of <pre>, so I had to compensate with periods for legibility, sorry)

I used to run Ubuntu Server with with one mdadm RAID5 array and one ZFS array using ZFS Native pool in RAIDZ1 as my file server. But I started running out of space in the RAID5 array, and was having massive problems with the ZFS pool under high IO (complete system lockups, deadlocks while flushing the write cache which killed SMB and NFS); 5Kb/sec writes and at most 5MB/sec reads after an initial 5-60 second _normal_ performance period.

I moved to OpenIndiana because I really like the long term and extensible benefits that ZFS offers, and the problems I was having seemed to only be happening to Linux users.

ZFS's built in, block-level data de-duplication means significant savings on episodic content. I'm currently running at 4% de-duplicated data. While 4% savings may not sound like much, I've got 4.5TB of TV shows that I'm storing in x264, and that yields a savings of around 100GB. I know that until recently, storage was dirt cheap, but even still, 100GB is nothing to scoff at. I've debated enabling the built-in compression, but I don't think I want to take the resource hit as my wife has recently started streaming things to her laptop while myself or our roommate are watching things on our respective computers.

Additionally, the ease of expanding and repairing my ZFS pool has made replacing hardware less time consuming, and has significantly lowered the performance hit while repairing the 'array'. Replacing a hard drive was dead simple with ZFS, and not nearly as nerve racking as the times I had to do so with my MDADM array. Additionally, I was still able to pull ~30MB/sec off the drives over SMB shares while the array was rebuilding. Writes also were similar over the network. Raw internal performance saw a significant hit, but moving things between ZFS file systems isn't something that needs to be done while rebuilding; using the media content is for my household.

Everything is running over Gigabit on cat5e with one Linksys 610N running DDWRT acting as a gigabit switch in my 'server room' (an uninsulated sunroom that's too hot to use in the summer and too cold to use in the winter), one crappy D-Link 5 port Gb switch , one Linksys e4200 acting as an AP and main switch, and an old Linksys WRT54GL running DD-WRT as my router and firewall. Recabling to Cat6 is extra expense for no practical gain. You're going to need it when you upgrade to 10GigE, but that's a few years away. By the time you start using 10GigE, Cat6 will be as cheap as 5E is now, and you still may not even see significant need to move to it.

Hardware wise, I'm running a system based on this motherboard, with 8GB RAM, this NIC, and this SATA controller, with a 80+Platinum certified power supply that I can't find a link to right now.

Solaris is installed on a Intel 320 80GB SSD, with 8GB dedicated as log space for my ZFS pool, and 40GB dedicated for cache space. I have one ZFS pool made up of two RAIDZ1 arrays. The first array is made up of 4 2TB WD Caviar Black (WD2001FASS) drives, and is attached to the SATA ports on my motherboard. The second array is made of 4 1TB WD Green drives attached to the LSI card.

Internal file moves average out at around 250MB sec for anything under 2GB, 800MB/sec for files larger than between 2GB and 7GB, and about 400MB/sec for anything over 7GB. Network writes are about 80MB/sec between servers, and about 40 max from elsewhere. which I attribute to the D-Link. Reads are also around 80MB/sec. I've been able to run 4 simultaneous 1080P streams without anyone complaining about stuttering, or excessive buffering at the start.

The system idles at around 40Watts, and under load pulls about 100. These numbers may be way off, because I honestly have no idea about how electricity

I suspect you're thinking of the AGPL, not the GPLv3.

However, that's sort of the point, and other businesses use it precisely for those reasons. For example, Launchpad licenses their software-project-hosting software as AGPL, because they don't want a competitor to be able to take their software, make proprietary changes to it, and then not share back the changes. Competitors are of course free to write their own, separate software.

The main thing I don't get with the angst is why it's directed specifically against the GPL, not all software that isn't BSD-licensed. The GPL offers some conditions under which you can modify software without negotiating a separate license agreement with the copyright holder. It doesn't remove any freedoms you previously had, since the default license is "all rights reserved".

Yeah. We're working on it. Because of the way we do kernels (always tracking the latest) it becomes hard to get both Graphics and MM working in these builds. See our current plan for this monthly milestone at: https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.12.

Yup, ZP for Zach Pfeffer. Linaro Android Platform lead. :) Checkout our work at: https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.09 https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.10 https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.11 ...and our team at: https://wiki.linaro.org/MeetTheTeam and https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android feel free to talk to us on freenode in the #linaro-android channel!

Yup, ZP for Zach Pfeffer. Linaro Android Platform lead. :) Checkout our work at: https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.09 https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.10 https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.11 ...and our team at: https://wiki.linaro.org/MeetTheTeam and https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android feel free to talk to us on freenode in the #linaro-android channel!

Yup, ZP for Zach Pfeffer. Linaro Android Platform lead. :) Checkout our work at: https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.09 https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.10 https://launchpad.net/linaro-android/+milestone/11.11 ...and our team at: https://wiki.linaro.org/MeetTheTeam and https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android feel free to talk to us on freenode in the #linaro-android channel!

It's a Ubuntu/Compiz bug. It bites me frequently in Mint 11 running Gnome. The command to reload the decorations is

compiz-decorator --replace

Yes I've made the mistake of these sorts of heavy drivers, never again.

You get the best information from HP's Linux site: https://launchpad.net/hplip and http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/ and find out what the rasorization engine is. From there get a generic one for Windows. Of course if the printer can do anything on its own just use a generic driver, Window's drivers are also annoyingly complex. I general would go up from the 1000 series to not have host based printing if you are going to use Windows.

Unity isn't a problem; Unity is a really nice Linux skin for custom devices. It's not even terrible for the desktop, outside of the fact that if your desktop doesn't match their UI layout, yer borked.

Mark Shuttleworth has made it perfectly clear that people who have any kind of reason why the left-hand side of the screen is not the right place for a task bar are power users and should either (a) change the code themselves, (b) use a different distro.

No, really! https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/668415

You should look into adding the Firefox Stable PPA. It currently has Firefox 7.0.1. With Firefox 8 having just been released, I would say this is pretty up to date, especially for Ubuntu LTS. If you want to get brave, you can even add the Firefox Beta PPA.

In my experience, about 18 months into the LTS cycle, it starts to become a pain using up to date programs. Being able to update a few key apps takes away the temptation to go for the regular (6 month) releases. Other options to stay up to date while only relying on Ubuntu packages include using Ubuntu Backports and Prevu.

--
Andy

Doesn't look like this will fix the much larger power issue with the Sandy Bridge processors, which is related to the graphics driver :-/ https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/818830

From the previous Slashdot article about this debacle (the one where Shuttlesworth says "power users" are all wankers for not loving the Unity) one is directed to https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/36 and then http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/ which states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

This is jumping the shark with *lasers*

I use a fairly up to date version of the latest Ubuntu, 11.10, as my desktop.

One thing I dislike is when they complicate things that used to be simple. It used to be if I wanted to switch to another workspace, I would move the mouse to the top of the screen and click which of the other workspaces I wanted. Simple.

Now to do that I have to move my mouse to the left side of the screen. Then a bar pops up on the left side of the screen, then I move to the workspace changer and click on it. It moves to workspace switcher mode. Then I move the mouse across the screen to the workspace I want and click. It complicates something that had been simple. In fact it's changed my behavior in a way I did not want it to - I used to run Firefox and Eclipse in separate workspaces, but as workspace switching is more of a hassle, I now have both open in one workspace.

Aside from things like that, Canonical decided it wanted to do things its own way and has been moving along with a Gnome fork. Which might be OK if it had enough resources. But it does not. for example, here is a bug that I encountered. Orange windows pop up all over your workspace while you're trying to work. It can be quite annoying, as the users comments suggest. It was reported over three weeks ago but a fix has not been released yet. Unity does not have a wide base of developers supporting it like Gnome or KDE do, almost all of the developers doing this type of work are working for Canonical.

I feel along with the sentiment. I do not look forward to putting Unity on my parents' computer but in my opinion there are a few changes that can be made to make it more friendly. First, remove the global menu bar, unless your users come from a Mac OS X background, it's not worth the retraining. Second change the backlight always on option in ccsm to toggle so it is easy to see when an application is running. I have big hopes for this alternate application launcher: https://launchpad.net/unity-lens-bliss

Maybe you've been running a single version, so you haven't tried supporting LTS with various machines. LTS goes on client machines, but if all your development machines don't run the older LTS version, then you'll find you're making nonbootable USB drives and CDs. Ubuntu bug 645818

My CD/DVD burner has been working only at random times for at least a couple of years and I discovered that there are very few things I need it for, if any. The next laptop I buy could be without it.

I used to preview new Ubuntu versions with a USB pen drive but I directly updated to the last two versions. Caveat: I usually wait 4 to 5 months to get some bugs fixed and let other users find workarounds for the other ones. I already know pretty well what to expect during the upgrade process when I eventually start it, but there always a few surprises that I have to google out. The upgrade to 10.10 was pretty smooth but the one to 11.04 was a little bumpier. I expect to switch to 11.10 by January or February: there are 2 o 3 bugs that directly concern me in the current list for 11.10

Obviously you haven't checked out gnome 3 key bindings:
    ctrl + left mouse button: start new instance
    alt + hold left mouse: move stuff around
    alt + suspend = shutdown!

It's not like gnome 2 panel was really working that well, but you're right about the 'fat fingers on a 3" touchscreen' feeling.

What's worse is crashes, take a look at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell

Maybe because the market share of Ubuntu is still near 0, and so there is not enough money to be worthwhile ?

If Microsoft really wanted to target someone, they would have gone to Red hat, Novell, IBM or others companies really making money, not against those that make so few money they need to steal it from Gnome project.

Canonical is not profitable, or Mark Shuttleworth would have said so. The spend a insane amount of money for each UDS ( because a good hotel for more than 150 people during 2 weeks ( 1 week of internal conference, and 1 week of UDS ), plus travel expenses ( for the 150 employee ), plus meal can quickly add up to 500 000 euros. There is 400 employees, see how much it cost to mozilla who have roughly the same size ( and who provides account, unlike Canonical ). They rent 1 floor on Millibank tower, and that's likely not cheap either, according to Wikipedia.

And now, try to find where they find enough money for that. Ubuntu One subscriptions when dropbox forced them to reduce their price ? Amazon refferal ? Magnatune deal ( around 3000 euros in one year ) ? Consulting, after being rejected by Google for ChromeOs, and given there is lots of competitor on their own product and given their involvement upstream on the stack is near zero ? Landscape, a tool to manage your server, but who was hosted outside of your firewall until last year ? Selling goodies to mindless users ?

Canonical is not yet profitable according to the last information we have. Maybe they will announce it soon. Maybe they will not. And once they will be able to survive without being helped by Mark like they did since 6 years, they will still face a tough competition.

Canonical tried the desktop market, without success. They wanted to go on server management ( landscape ), they failed. They wanted to go on the service for consumer ( ie ubuntuone ), they failed. And despites trying to innovate with Unity, they alinated a rather vocal portion of their user base, thus starting to ruin their best asset. And so now, their focus is the cloud, with the current manager fudding like if there was no tomorow on his blog ( http://undacuvabrutha.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/ubuntu-is-the-os-for-the-cloud-and-heres-why/ ), planning to carpet bomb the world with news about their cloud ( https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-get-involved-campaigns , https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-increase-cloudportal-traffic ). Ironically, their own cloud without any interopperability due to their usage of ubuntu specific repositories in the official charm/recipes of juju/ensemble.

So Canonical will also fail wit this plan, especially now that Suse is getting a step on Openstack, as well as Red Hat. Red hat who have also decided to address the interoprability problem with Deltacloud and others tools.

And for the so called arm servers plan of Canonical, maybe they didn't get the memo about current arm CPU being 32 bits and thus a little bit limited in term of memory. Arm servers could be nice, but without lots of memory, it is just cheaper to get a regular server and use vrtualisation. Only specific consumers and hobbyists would be interested by current arm servers , and unfortunately for canonical, that's not on the road for money. In fact, there is already lots of NAS for that.

Thankfully, ARM CEO changed his mind ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/218794/arm_ceo_no_rush_to_design_a_64bit_server_chip.html ), and maybe in 2 years, we will see ARM 64 bits (

Maybe because the market share of Ubuntu is still near 0, and so there is not enough money to be worthwhile ?

If Microsoft really wanted to target someone, they would have gone to Red hat, Novell, IBM or others companies really making money, not against those that make so few money they need to steal it from Gnome project.

Canonical is not profitable, or Mark Shuttleworth would have said so. The spend a insane amount of money for each UDS ( because a good hotel for more than 150 people during 2 weeks ( 1 week of internal conference, and 1 week of UDS ), plus travel expenses ( for the 150 employee ), plus meal can quickly add up to 500 000 euros. There is 400 employees, see how much it cost to mozilla who have roughly the same size ( and who provides account, unlike Canonical ). They rent 1 floor on Millibank tower, and that's likely not cheap either, according to Wikipedia.

And now, try to find where they find enough money for that. Ubuntu One subscriptions when dropbox forced them to reduce their price ? Amazon refferal ? Magnatune deal ( around 3000 euros in one year ) ? Consulting, after being rejected by Google for ChromeOs, and given there is lots of competitor on their own product and given their involvement upstream on the stack is near zero ? Landscape, a tool to manage your server, but who was hosted outside of your firewall until last year ? Selling goodies to mindless users ?

Canonical is not yet profitable according to the last information we have. Maybe they will announce it soon. Maybe they will not. And once they will be able to survive without being helped by Mark like they did since 6 years, they will still face a tough competition.

Canonical tried the desktop market, without success. They wanted to go on server management ( landscape ), they failed. They wanted to go on the service for consumer ( ie ubuntuone ), they failed. And despites trying to innovate with Unity, they alinated a rather vocal portion of their user base, thus starting to ruin their best asset. And so now, their focus is the cloud, with the current manager fudding like if there was no tomorow on his blog ( http://undacuvabrutha.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/ubuntu-is-the-os-for-the-cloud-and-heres-why/ ), planning to carpet bomb the world with news about their cloud ( https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-ensemble-get-involved-campaigns , https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-o-increase-cloudportal-traffic ). Ironically, their own cloud without any interopperability due to their usage of ubuntu specific repositories in the official charm/recipes of juju/ensemble.

So Canonical will also fail wit this plan, especially now that Suse is getting a step on Openstack, as well as Red Hat. Red hat who have also decided to address the interoprability problem with Deltacloud and others tools.

And for the so called arm servers plan of Canonical, maybe they didn't get the memo about current arm CPU being 32 bits and thus a little bit limited in term of memory. Arm servers could be nice, but without lots of memory, it is just cheaper to get a regular server and use vrtualisation. Only specific consumers and hobbyists would be interested by current arm servers , and unfortunately for canonical, that's not on the road for money. In fact, there is already lots of NAS for that.

Thankfully, ARM CEO changed his mind ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/218794/arm_ceo_no_rush_to_design_a_64bit_server_chip.html ), and maybe in 2 years, we will see ARM 64 bits (

I got brand new Lenovo IdeaPad U160 with i3 about year ago. Tried Debian and openSuse, both had issues with intel graphics driver (black screen). There is bug report opened and some patches available, but i gave up after 6 months of trying. Full story here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/608907

Actually, I filed a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/834037 (and another directly with the Linux kernel devs) and started an ubuntuforums thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1822629 . I did as much as I was able to with my skill set to gather information about the bug, and it looks like MANY others are experiencing the same problem. I would guess that you are also experiencing it, but just have not noticed (do an experiment and find out, and please report back on the bug). Thanks for the comment though -_-

?? It's been working fine on my wife's Sandy Bridge i3 since 3.0 (including the onboard graphics). Actually the stock 2.6.39 released with Natty ran okay on it; I built a 3.0 kernel and ran that which worked better, particularly in conjunction with a recent Mesa and libva. I've since dist-upgraded her to Oneiric and everything still runs fine (still on 3.0, and I gather there are some further improvements planned for 3.1) - but I wouldn't exactly say it was broken before.

There are serious power usage regressions, making many laptop users suffer. Compare, e.g., https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/834037

exactly, its not like they couldn't work out of one of the many hosted public code repositories.

So I can document five different places in the application that ordinary people would expect to change the language of the text, but none of them actually do it. Instead they present the user with five different sets of languages/locales/etc... being installed, but because none of the lists agree, the user has no idea whether any particular language is actually installed or not.

So You may very well be right. Perhaps the languages are installed, but no mortal human will be able to find them. Even If I did as you say, and installed less than all the languagaes, which I don't recall doing months ago, but it could have happenned. It should not be this difficult to add them later.

Next... What do you mean by "default install" ?

When I say default install I mean use the packaging system, and thus the LO that came with the OS when it was installed. By default, languages are not installed. Even though LO icons are all over the unity launcher on the left, and even though writer comes up when I click on a odt document, I decided to go and check if, for some strange reason, LO is not actually installed. so I go to the Ubuntu Software Centre, I search for libreoffice, and low and behold, it offers to install it for me! Full of hope (desperation?) I click install, and authenticate, and then let it trundle for ten minutes or so. Finally it is done.

I fire up the file manager, click on an opendocument, and try to spell check in Canadian French. Nope, no difference whatsoever... So I go back to the software centre, and hit "Remove" so it trundles for a while preparing to remove, and then crashes. I start-up the software centre again, and it offers to install it again. I do dpkg -l | grep libreoffice, and all the libreoffice packages are there, except for the language packs. wtf does ''Remove" from software Centre do if it doesn't even remove it? oth, it is likely consistent, since it worked before it was "installed" and it still worked after it was "Removed"

Starting to see a pattern? Stuff is pretty, it looks like it ought to work, it looks like it should be simple. There are ten different easy ways to do things. But if you actually see it through, all the simple obvious stuff doesn't work. broken, horribly mangled, user hostile. btw... a relevant a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/875850

I could be feeding a troll here but... The problem with writing a terminal emulator using old-school methods ("HTML4 Powered") is the latency and overhead associated with long-polling and long-held HTTP streams. It would be incredibly slow and inefficient to have more than one terminal open at a time. I know this for a fact. How?

I've written such an app

No one ever used it--not even me. Because it sucked. Without WebSockets and Web Workers such a thing will always be slow. Without HTML5's "contentEditable" ability you can't even copy & paste properly.

Shuttleworth is determined to change much of the Linux desktop infrastructure, if not a lot of what we've taken for granted in Unix systems in general.

Just to clarify, I think some of these changes are positive and long-overdue (Upstart), even if I don't always like the way Ubuntu implements them (PulseAudio). Others, I've *tried* very hard to like, but are just unusable ("Netbook Edition" and its spiritual successor Unity). And then there's the occasional change like this...

They still haven't made any progress on the issue with multiple monitors whereby the left panel goes in a shitty place depending upon which screen is your main monitor. Mark Shuttleworth weighed in and basically said fuck you we're not fixing it. Even though ~50% of multiple monitor configurations are affected by this.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/742544