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Can it install mp3 support, and other proprietary components out of the box? Nope - the reasons for this have already been discussed ad nauseum. However 'Easy Ubuntu' will install all these and more, with a GUI interface just like we love. The link is available off the forums at http://ubuntuforums.org/ - a direct link on Slashdot being a little mean... (hint- there's a link on the front page)

I'm using it right now, and apart from a new splash screen that resembles the forums theme and the replacement of the GNOME foot with the Ubuntu logo in the top left corner, the most immediately obvious changes to the end user are the features introduced by GNOME 2.12. Namely, the menu editor, disks manager, clipboard daemon, Evince document viewer, drag-and-drop preview, type-ahead-find for Epiphany and GNOME's help browser, and so on. That stupid gedit focus bug is fixed. The switch from OpenOffice 1.1.3 to OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Beta 2) is a substantial one as well; xine 1.1 and AbiWord 1.1, unfortunately, were released too late Breezy's dev cycle and aren't included. Similarly, 5.10 has shipped with GStreamer 0.8, which is still unusable for video, so you'll want to install totem-xine over totem-gstreamer as soon as possible. Under the hood, Ubuntu is now using the 2.6.12 kernel, modular X.org and GCC 4.0.1. Ubuntu has also updated their ATI fglrx drivers to 8.16.20, which gives a significant performance boost (from crap to less crap) for those cursed with ATI cards.
 
Overall, my end user impressions are that this is a worthy and welcome upgrade to my distribution of choice, but apparently I'm only really scratching the surface. According to the release notes, the major features of 5.10 are advanced thin client integration, an OEM installer, the Edubuntu project for deploying Ubuntu in schools, and Launchpad integration ("Launchpad.net is the new infrastructure that Ubuntu and its derivatives use for translation, bug tracking, sharing code patches, fixes and technical support."). So, in short, I like what I'm seeing, but what I haven't seen looks even better.

No need for that, havent you heard abt EasyUbuntu yet?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=64629&hig hlight=EasyUbuntu

Ubuntu?

Actually, despite being a moderator on the Ubuntu Forum I would say that Linspire is closer to what a home user wants. They can buy it preinstalled on a computer from Wal-Mart. And it has many things like codecs and such out of the box that Ubuntu won't have (because one of the goals of Ubuntu is to be a libre OS).

I'm not saying that new users shouldn't use Ubuntu, but in those cases I recommend that you- the nerd- set it up for them.

Tiger is more like a Xbox game than Linux or Windows as far as development goes (way smaller control group), and Vista doesn't come for a while. My Gnome desktop looks awesome today. GNU is doing the best it can with the resources it has.

My Gnome 2.12 desktop does not look like Windows you insensitive clod!

You asked the right person- I care way too much about xcompmgr.

As it is xcompmgr does not have really active development. Pretty much the "final version" was released and is in Ubuntu....but that does not mean nothing has happened. You have two options:

1. (the one I recommend) I am using Breezy right now and I can say that it works much better with xcompmgr than before. The biggest bug for me- artifacts when playing full screen video- is gone in Totem-xine. GONE! The only xine to do that. Its what I really wanted for Christmas. The other bug- the log out screen one- still exists but I have found an elegant work around. Using these directions you can create a panel button to turn it off and on (no crashing). So just turn it off before you log out. Because Breezy likes xcompgr more (the developers were nice and compiled Gnome 2.12's Metacity without its featureless compmgr like they did in Hoary because they heard my begging-it helps to be the second biggest poster in the forum) I found a way to make it stable for you. If I remember correctly you did not like the fading trick, right? Thats awesome for you. Run xcompmgr with this command:

xcompmgr -n

and it will just use the GPU. No tricks, no crashing (me and another Ubuntu fan hammered on this and with just that option it was very stable compared to the fading and drop shadow options)....it just flys! I personally don't do that command (I love the fading) and so I have to deal with some random crashes-much less than Hoary though. You are lucky you do not. Then you must make it start when Gnome starts (go to "System," the "Preferences," then "Sessions." Click the last tab and hit "Add" and the "xcompmgr -n" command and run it in "order 48" -thats what I do, some say use "0" but that only worked for me in Hoary, not Breezy). I must admit that when it boots the desktop might be a little out of focus (or really out of focus with a little garbage) but as soon as you maximize a window everything works like a charm.

2. Use KDE. KDE forked xcompmgr and integrated it into its Window Manager. If you have your xorg file set up, then it gives you a "transparency" tab in the "window decoration" settings box. Its cool, and I hear a lot of the effects (like the fading and such) will be more stable by 3.5. The Gnome guys seem to refuse to do anymore than make Gnome work with xcompmgr because it requires non-OSS drivers to work (Gnome was started because of such strong principles). But since you don't ask much (in the way of effects)...either way will work for you. As you can tell, I care a lot...and the Gnome approach is enough for me for now...

I think you're referring to AllowGLXWithComposite, as described in this HOWTO on Ubuntu compositing. I tried it after installing the nvidia driver module, and a bunch of other steps, as detailed in this other post in this thread.

If you want the full effect you have to go into Gconf and tell nautilus to not draw the desktop, but otherwise it works pretty good. I have found that overall its faster than Metacity, and is more stable with xcompmgr. I just wish I could find another way to task switch in E17 that is not alt-tab, and I hope that one day E17 will conform to Freedesktop standards so I can use Kompose with it!

This thread is a bit more straightforward as it's focused only on installing e17.

There was recently a how-to posted on getting Ubuntu and E16-E17 paired up on ubuntu forums if anyone is interested and hasn't seen it:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=54476

The job of a linux distributor (such as Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu etc) is primarily that of assembling a large quantity of free and open source software into an easy to use and pre-configured package. While they may write and contribute some of their own software to the mix, and do some customisation and bug fixes of their own, 95%+ of the software you see in a linux distro will be common to other distrabutions.

I don't use Red Hat or Fedora myself, so could be wrong about the below, but... Fedora is developed by the community (Red Hat also helps to develop it) and is kept fairly up-to date with new software releases. Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses snapshot of Fedora as a core, keeps it stable (ie doesn't update it that often, just bug fixes) and adds a few bits of proprietary software and adds in the support contract (most people buy Red Hat for the support). If you want Red Hat without the support, and the RH branding, then maybe CentOS is what you are looking for.

I would personally suggest Ubuntu Linux, which is Debian based, its fairly well polished and most things will work straight out of the box, so you shouldn't need too much in the way of support to get it setup (Though I have had some difficulties with the 64 bit version). Even things like Java, ATI/nVidia drivers and multimedia codexs can be gotten via apt-get (you may need the extras repository for some of these). If you need paid support, Canonical will support Ubuntu for $100 USD per computer per year (I haven't used them myself, so can't say how good they are).

If you want free support, then goggle is your friend, as is reading the documentation, searching goggle groups, asking on mailing lists and visiting IRC channels. The only cost is the time and effort to find the answers for yourself (which doubles as a good education in Linux). You are not guaranteed an answer, but will usually find one, nor a time limit on how long it will take to find or receive an answer. This is the method that most individuals actually use, though it does require that you are willing to learn. In a business where time is money, it is possible that paid support may work out cheaper than your own time in searching google (it depends on how much your time is worth compared to the time saved via a support contract), but in comparison, I will ask you when was the last time you phoned up Microsoft and had them tell you how to fix your problem.

As for the Mozilla Corporation, they are very new and haven't done anything that I could comment on, but I see it as very, very unlikely that its formation will have a detrimental effect to the development of free and open source Firefox. We already have Netscape as a commercial company that takes Firefox, gives a customised setup, adds alot of their own branding to the package and throws in a few proprietary components and calls it Netscape 8. Firefox is not the poor "free starter edition" cousin to Netscape 8. As long as people are intrested in Firefox, then it will continue to be developed and it will always remain free.

For businesses specialising in free and open source software, the "switchero" is fairly uncommon. FLOSS licences actually prevent people from doing a "switchero" on existing software, if its been releases as FLOSS then that version will be free forever. With non copyleft (ie GPL) licences (or when exceptions are made in the licence), then someone can make a proprietary fork of the project and future versions of that fork may not be free, though others are still free to continue to work on the FLOSS version. This can also happen with copyleft or GPL software when only one person, or one group, owns ALL the copyright to the software and can thus change the licence for future versions (such as PHPedit). In many cases, where the software has been developed by the community, there are too many copyright holders for this

I haven't had any trouble with printer sharing with ubuntu. Check out the forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/.

" I'd love to hear some feedback if someone's found a nice and easy way to manage packages on Linux to get a good installation of:

Firefox,
OpenOffice,
VLC,
XMMS,
ACPI,
Fluxb ox (or Gnome)"

I'm a Linux newb but....

Firefox - comes with Ubuntu
OpenOffice - comes with Ubuntu
VLC - can't help you here, ask about it on ubuntu forums
XMMS - Get the Ubuntu Add-on (zip or cd) from mr. bass..makes everything nice and easy.
ACPI - ask on ubuntu forums, might want to ask with specific problem and hardware info.
Fluxbox (or Gnome) - Ubuntu comes with Gnome. If you're having probs with Fluxbox, maybe try xfce (another lightweight) instead? I installed xfce (can be found from mr. bass, with the other stuff) and works great for me.

One thing I love about ubuntu is the forums. No matter what level of experience you have people seem very willing, even happy, to help. Without any perceptable elitist attitude either.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/ - Forums
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/ - Unofficial Ubuntu Guide 5.04

I invite you to come to the Ubuntu Forum. I'm a moderator there, and we have a section just for new users. You might not get all the help you want, but you get the best possible considering what you pay for it. Please consider it.

Picture is worth a 1000 words.

the Ubuntu forums on hardware problems.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/index.php?

This is great news for Ubuntu. Up until now its fans knew it was in good hands (Mark has a lot of money) but we didn't know his level of commitment. Now we do. I think part of the reason the foundation was made was because of Ubuntu's success as a new distro (few have their name so known in such a short time) and because there will be a push in the future to get Ubuntu in places that demand stability in organization- businesses and schools. In particular, the next release Breezy will begin Edubuntu a goal of Mark to turn Ubuntu into an OS that can meet the needs of schools.

Hopefully this will once and for all establish Ubuntu as one of the big players in the Linux scene, and further legitimize its claim to the great Debian heritage.

I personally hope that some of this money will be spent on creating more bounties to create some of the GUI tools the distro currently lacks.For now this is a great thing.

Hip Hip Hoary and long live Ubuntu!

Disclaimer: I know a pretty good bit about the project seeing as how I'm a moderator (and one of the largest posters) on the forum.

For me personally Ubuntu just does a lot of the little things correctly. Its based off of Debian, so it has access to the what might be the biggest package repo in the land (I don't know about Gentoo , but Ubuntu has 15000+ packages in all of its repos together), but the developers only support a small part of that so unlike Debian there are timely releases. Like Fedora and Dropline, Ubuntu has a great Gnome desktop (I'll admit that Kubuntu isn't as polished) that is very useful from the start.

It has a great community (can't compare it with Gentoo, its a different crowd) that is more than willing to help. Our how to section is excellent.

It supports important things like Mono and Python, and helps Debian catch up to the modern era (by adding things like Xorg).

Finally, Ubuntu is easy to use out of the box (for most nerds) but can be VERY configurable (though probably not as much as Gentoo) and is a happy medium between a Xandros and a Slackware.

Thanks for you time.

Umm...the developers didn't want to support the new packages. Its a smart decision, those new packages might bring bugs and mess up a done deal. They are still easily availible. I have never had a stability problem using Ubuntu Backports. The person that runs it is really nice and picky about bugs...

Yep...Ubuntu gave them good jobs...what an evil thing.

buntu is slightly repackaging the work of the real packagers, the Debian people, and calling it a new distro.

Plus stuff like new Xorg, Mono, and Gnome before Sid get it. Thats easy to forget though.

It's basically a hostile fork, and we are the worse for it.

I disagree.

Glad to see it worked out for you. You may be aware of these but these are good Ubuntu resources. Maybe they can help with your problem:

Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Beginner Guide
Ubuntu Discussion Forums

Cheers!

Hello. I noticed that you will be undertaking a task I recently went through, putting Linux on an original iBook. That link has most of my experiance, but here is a quick summary:

For a good experiance in Ubuntu, at least 256mb of RAM is needed. You can get by with less if you are willing to hack and try other window managers, but if you want the nice integrated experiance you have to have at least that much ram. I have 300 in my iBook and it runs great. Better than the original OS in my opinion. But that Live CD might not run so well, as the iBook's cd drive is slow.

You will be happy to know that the Airport card works without a hitch. I use WEP and Wireless networking all day long. With this howto you can get the great Kismet to work.

PPC Linux lacks a real flash pluggin. There are free ones but they don't work so good (they require more CPU power than iBook has most of the time). Looking at broken puzzle pieces suck, so I use this extension and never click play.

But sure to check out the Ubuntu Guide, as most of the advice (everything cept windows codecs, those don't work) is the same for PPC. Also check out the PPC wiki.

Good luck and be sure to come to the forums if you need help.

Hello. I noticed that you will be undertaking a task I recently went through, putting Linux on an original iBook. That link has most of my experiance, but here is a quick summary:

For a good experiance in Ubuntu, at least 256mb of RAM is needed. You can get by with less if you are willing to hack and try other window managers, but if you want the nice integrated experiance you have to have at least that much ram. I have 300 in my iBook and it runs great. Better than the original OS in my opinion. But that Live CD might not run so well, as the iBook's cd drive is slow.

You will be happy to know that the Airport card works without a hitch. I use WEP and Wireless networking all day long. With this howto you can get the great Kismet to work.

PPC Linux lacks a real flash pluggin. There are free ones but they don't work so good (they require more CPU power than iBook has most of the time). Looking at broken puzzle pieces suck, so I use this extension and never click play.

But sure to check out the Ubuntu Guide, as most of the advice (everything cept windows codecs, those don't work) is the same for PPC. Also check out the PPC wiki.

Good luck and be sure to come to the forums if you need help.

Very true. And the reason for this is so many people have Windows. Almost 90% of PCs on W3C have some variant of Windows. Baring in mind that this will be particularly techie community, it doesn't bode well.

The fact of the matter is, for most manufacturers, it just isn't cost effective to make their devices compatible with Linux, then test against various distros with various kernel configurations on various hardwares just to tap into under 4% of the market. Firefox has almost 1 in 10 people on the web, and some businesses still think its not viable to support it.

It's going to take some dedicated geeks to introduce Linux to the general public. Without market share, no-one's going to bother.

Linspire and (though it pains me to say this) Xandros are two viable distros that are either ready or nearly ready for the main-stream market. Hell, even SUSE is pretty useable for Linux n00bs.

As for lack of support, there are plenty of forums full of friendly people willing to help, or providing in depth documentation.

Give a man Linux, and he'll use it, get stuck and return to Windows. Teach him to use Linux, and how to find help, and we've improved our market share.

I wish there had been a "warty point five" release where they kept the old (and reasonably well performing) X system and the old fam (which, ironically, had finally been fixed to pretty robust operation just weeks before warty came out using the newfangled and terribly misbehaving gam) and updated nautilus and firefox and gaim and gimp.

You have backports, maybe that could do the trick for you.


Why is my screen stuck at 640x480?
Why is there no sound?
Why is the sound out of sync in all my videos?
Why can't I unmount my encrypted hard drive space?
Why can't I rename files in nautilus?

These are the sort of very simple problems few had with warty and everyone seems to have with hoary

Funny, my experience with Warty and Hoary has been the opposite.

Hee hee haw haw, WHEN? My Windows drive *still* crawls like a mummy booting up, IE *still* takes a coon's age to find a webpage, and the only reason I'm spared my weekly ritual of staying up all night with Windows picking the malware out of it is that I could automate the process from Linux with Bash shell scripts, accessing Windows as a mounted vfat partition!

Booting time: How about some hard figures? I've clocked 1 minute 18 seconds to get Kubuntu to the login screen, let alone the desktop. I'll concede that IE takes longer to resolve names, for whatever reason. As for malware, you should probably switch to Firefox, if you haven't already. All I get is cookies. Also, vfat is a crap filesystem :p

have no idea what color the sky is in your world, but *every* copy of Windows *still* BSOD's on a regular basis. What's gone are those "(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?" prompts, because Windows crib-deathed DOS. Bloat...count the megabytes on a Windows partition and a Linux partition. Look at the footprints. Case closed. And "Clippy" still comes with Microslop products, being sold on shelves today!

As for BSODs, I guess we'll never know - I hear equally often about people running Windows datacentres or whatever that they bluescreen regularly, or never at all. In my experience, they don't. As for the hard-drive space per installed apps, I agree readily - I can install software with a trowel on Linux, and never get it over 4GBs. As for speed and memory consumption, in my personal experience Windows is currently faster and lighter, but the F/OSS community is more focussed on getting it optimised than Microsoft is.

Don't lie, you hate F/OSS and it shows...

Go back and check through my posts, and see how wrong you are. Check through my posts on the Ubuntu forums (userid; I've entered ssj_195 into the ICQ field to prove it's me). Of course, if it comforts you to believe that anyone who complains about some aspects of F/OSS "hates it and it shows", then that's your prerogative, and lands you squarely in the group of damaging people I was complaining about.

Gee, the huge development teams behind the dozens of major Linux distros sure are sorry that they can't come up to your high standards! Like still being free, still being open source, still being able to run on a wider variety of hardware, not using Mafioso tactics to try to bully the whole world into paying them money to use their software, coming with more programs for free than you can possibly buy for Windows with all the money in the world, having system documentation that's actually helpful, coming in a hundred different flavors/varieties/distributions to suit every taste (I wouldn't mind a "Windows from scratch distro!"),

Fair enough, though note that at least some of these are more philosophical than pragmatic. I apologise for using the term "has many advantages over", as Linux clearly does have many, many advantages - I withdraw it completely. But Microsoft is going after the quantifiable ones with gusto, and I'm sick of people burying their heads in the sand about just what a well-motivated Microsoft can pull off.

and finally...what's now coming into bearing as Linux-user's newest gain to crow about, actually being *easier* to install and configure than Windows is: as anybody will plainly see, installing Windows and Linux cold on the bare iron, as opposed to naively running the first piece of software that they had installed at the computer store for them.

On my laptop and desktop this is true (except there won't be reliable 3D acceleration on my laptop until next year, probably). For other people, the exact reverse is the case. Having said that, Linux perhaps has the upper hand due to the sheer volume of open source drivers (which can then of course be provided in every distro, and automatica

I think the link to the demo page was in this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=34099

It might even be the link in the first post, but I can't tell as I've upgraded to 1.0.4 and also do not speak German :)

You can see the conversation with Schneller over at the ubuntu boards: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=28410&pag e=1&pp=10&highlight=%22hp%22+%22ubuntu%22+%22nc612 0%22

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=34155

It's a great feeling when the clouds suddenly part and someone sees the light! ;) And I agree that the Windows-Way is only intuitive because it is what we are used to it - a completely new user, faced with the task of installing a piece of software they'd heard about, would probably pick up the mouse, hold it to their lips and say "Computer: install Firefox!". Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point - they would expect to be able to click on something that says "Install Software" and let the computer do the work, rather than gallavanting around the net ("Go-ogle? What's that?!") manually downloading shit ("I just downloaded a file, but where did it go? What to I do now?"). Quite why distros don't have such a button on their default desktops is beyond me.

Firefox 1.0.4 is available in backports. To get it add the following to your sources.list:
deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ubp hoary-backports main universe multive\ rse restricted
deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ubp hoary-extras main universe multiverse\ restricted

Firefox 1.0.4 is available in backports. To get it add the following to your sources.list:
deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ubp hoary-backports main universe multive\ rse restricted
deb http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ubp hoary-extras main universe multiverse\ restricted

Ubuntu Backports backports packages from the unstable branch, and makes sure they're stable. I have the latest versions of firefox, gaim, and other software. Check it out: http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/

Nice timing on this - Over the weekend, I changed my apt sources.list to breezy instead of hoary, did an apt-get dist-upgrade, and things ran relatively smoothly for me. (I had to re-install the nvidia drivers, but no big deal). The whole purpose of this upgrade was to get transcode working on an AMD64 machine, so I could push the processing power of this machine a little more. ;)

My experience with Ubuntu on AMD64 has been excellent on the whole, but with a few caveats of what I wish I could do:

First, when I "apt-get install" Apache2, PHP, and Mysql, and then check out PHP, it says that PHP wasn't compiled with the mysql module. (see the thread here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=28241) Having to recompile that is a PITA.

Second, another favorite tool of mine, FreeNX, is available for 32-bit versions of Ubuntu, but not 64-bit.

But I guess the real killer of all the current 64-bit distrobutions right now is the multimedia support. Ubuntu is doing a lot of things right, and it was easy to install and start using, but it hasn't quite gotten all the way there for me (and probably many other users) yet.

No menu editor.

*sigh*

but without the arrow telling you it's a shortcut

I have arrows on shortcuts...?

And a continually decreasing level of configurability.

I have about four to five completely new configuration panels in 2.10 than I had in 2.8. And several more are unofficially available. How is this a decreasing level of configurability?

I wonder if we're actually both using GNOME...

First of all, some xcompmgr support would be nice. Gnome has a few BIG problems with using that program, which is unfortunate because using it on my computer speeds up the sluggish Gnome.

Another thing would be better wireless support. Unlike KDE, there is no app that can do what Kismet can. The network app. lets you connect wirelessly, but no part Gnome lets you scan. In this department many good programs have appeared that would fix this problem. I like- Wifi Radarand this applet

They only need to be incorporated (or packaged with a Gnome distro for the love of diety).

Many people think that Gnome's biggest problem is RAM usage, and they might be right. 256mb feels VERY different than 512mb on the same machine. I personally believe that this problem was made worse in the last release, not made better. I think that 2.12 has intentions on fixing this, so I care more about Gnome 2's interface problems.

Next you must find out if you have the correct hardware. The best case scenario is that you have a newer Nvidia card. Any modern (at least a geforce 2) Nvidia card can do the coolest eyecandy trick ever- fading! Each window fades into whats below it. Its hard to describe, and it cannot be expressed with screenshot or low res movie. Let me say that fading is worth every penny of a new Nvidia 5200fx card I bought just to be able to do it.

If you have a newer Nvidia card (anything more recent than the geforce 4 series), you can add a sweet trick to the fading- drop shadows! I personally believe these are overrated, but many people LOVE them. To get any Nvidia card to do this fun stuff, you must have the driver installed (trivial to do in Ubuntu) and you must get the driver to accerate composite (I give instructions how at the end).

If you don't have an Nvidia card...well...think about buying one. Mesa drivers and ATI's flgrx drivers can do Drop Shadows (it takes a performance hit to do it though), but nothing but an Nvidia card can fade worth a damn. As I said, some people like the drop shadows, so try them out if you want. Anything faster than 1ghz and its almost free eyecandy. But-in the long run- if you want the best eye candy Linux has to offer- you need an Nvidia card. ATI is the devil.

Directions of how to do everything (including how to enable acceration with Nvidia drivers) can be found here. Have fun!! I know I do...

I heartily agree with most of the replies here. Debian is an excellent, stable server O/S but on the desktop I'm afraid it's utterly stale. It's so out of date it may as well be touted as a historical edition (Debian "Prehistorux" ?)

Ubunutu on the other hand is the best thing that's EVER happened to desktop Linux. It's the most user friendly, best specified distro yet and actually looks like it was put together by someone who uses it for their day to day desktop. e.g. Instead of installing 500 apps for each purpose there's just one best of breed for each.

And after using the wonderful little "hoary after install helper" script to get your mp3, DVD and w32codec needs sorted (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=22860 for details) it's simply a pleasure to use. A sheer pleasure.

In fact if it wasn't for a couple Windows apps that I can't do without (and that don't run under Wine) I would switch full time to Ubuntu. No question of it. It now makes me sad to boot to Windows when I could be in Ubuntu.

...is the "Ubuntu spatial" mode hacked into Nautilus (and turned on by default) just a few days before 5.04 went gold, which makes Ubuntu's file and folder management different from every other Gnome implementation out there. Why was this done? Seems Mark Shuttleworth decided by fiat that this new way is better. People are not amused.

...is the "Ubuntu spatial" mode hacked into Nautilus (and turned on by default) just a few days before 5.04 went gold, which makes Ubuntu's file and folder management different from every other Gnome implementation out there. Why was this done? Seems Mark Shuttleworth decided by fiat that this new way is better. People are not amused.

Yeah. Cause that proves a lot. Look at all the people who've had problems installing various Linux distros. They must all suck too! *rolls eyes*

A 3rd party Ubuntu menu-editor can be found here

See
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24233
ahref=http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=242 33http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24233>
It explains all

Download the torrent

New stuff include

• Gnome 2.10.1, which makes the desktop a lot faster than before
• X.org
• Simplified update- and package management
• Much faster boot process
• Better laptop support (ie suspending, hibernating, processor frequency scaling)
• Kickstart support for automated largescale installations
• Live CD and Install CD both use the new debian installer infrastructure
• UTF-8 by default
• A program for collecting information about what hardware works and what doesn't
• Kubuntu - complete KDE 3.4 based version of Ubuntu

Stuff people are going to bitch about

• No graphical installer. The current installer is extremely simple and has been streamlined even further in this release. A graphical installer is planned for the next version (Breezy Badger).
• No menu editor installed. One can always edit the files by hand, or install kmenu or something similar for gnome. The official gnome menu editor just didn't finish in time.
• No DivX or MP3 support. These are simple to add though and anyone coming from debian will probably already know of the Marillat repositories. Just look at the instructions in the wiki or use Hoary After-Install helper or another script to do the dirty work for you.

OSDir has published a lot of screenshots of Ubuntu.

Oh and if you are interested to know if your laptop or other piece of hardware is supported, some info can be found in the wiki on the Hardware support-page

Primary mirrors

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Europe

Other mirrors

Australia Canada Croatia Czech Republic France Germany Germany Ireland Italy Lithuania Namibia Netherlands Norway Portugal Portugal South Africa Spain Switzerland United Kingdom United Kingdom United Kingdom United States United States United States

Download the torrent

New stuff include

• Gnome 2.10.1, which makes the desktop a lot faster than before
• X.org
• Simplified update- and package management
• Much faster boot process
• Better laptop support (ie suspending, hibernating, processor frequency scaling)
• Kickstart support for automated largescale installations
• Live CD and Install CD both use the new debian installer infrastructure
• UTF-8 by default
• A program for collecting information about what hardware works and what doesn't
• Kubuntu - complete KDE 3.4 based version of Ubuntu

Stuff people are going to bitch about

• No graphical installer. The current installer is extremely simple and has been streamlined even further in this release. A graphical installer is planned for the next version (Breezy Badger).
• No menu editor installed. One can always edit the files by hand, or install kmenu or something similar for gnome. The official gnome menu editor just didn't finish in time.
• No DivX or MP3 support. These are simple to add though and anyone coming from debian will probably already know of the Marillat repositories. Just look at the instructions in the wiki or use Hoary After-Install helper or another script to do the dirty work for you.

OSDir has published a lot of screenshots of Ubuntu.

Oh and if you are interested to know if your laptop or other piece of hardware is supported, some info can be found in the wiki on the Hardware support-page

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One can get sound to work on the Mac Mini. There is a post from a guy getting it to work on Ubuntuforums.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=12748

The biggest disappointment is that sound doesn't work yet. In the Ubuntu forums there are some comments on forcing the snd-powermac driver to work with the Mini, but I haven't had any luck with it using Debian's 2.6.9 powerpc kernel.

I don't have the first fucking idea what that's supposed to mean.

And you shouldn't if you don't use GNOME, because even if you did use it, you're not supposed to need to select a different backend for GStreamer. Some distros don't even include it in the menu because its advanced configuration that most users will never need. It's purpose is to allow you to use a different sound server, like KDE's artsd. If you want to know more about it, google some of the terms you don't know about. I'm not trying to to belittle you, but you're coming out of nowhere trying to put down the design of things you've never even used. It shouldn't be a surprise that you don't know the purpose of some things.

Volume isn't related to sound controls? I think you'll find you're mistaken.

No, that's not what I said. Volume isn't related to the Multimedia Systems Selector. It's named that because that's exactly what it is. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it should have a volume control slapped on it. Like I said before, it's a window that you would never see unless you typed the command in the command line since it's not in the menu.

What's a panel, and what's an applet?

Panels are the bars at the top and bottom of the screen. they hold programs called applets. Look in the screenshot you were referring to. See the little speaker icon at the top right? That's what any user trying to change the volume would go to, not the Multimedia Systems Selector, because, for the third and final time, it's an advanced configuration program not meant for most users to deal with.

Pop in one of the many live CDs that have been posted on Slashdot over the past week or so and try out GNOME. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much easier it is to use than you think. There's still a lot of room for improvement though, and it gets better with every release. I hear 2.10 has a new volume control applet.

I haven't tried that particular combination (WET+Teamspeak), but lots of problems with simultaneous sounds were solved for me when I finally found this HOWTO for multiple sounds in the Ubuntu forums. It turns out that even though the ALSA docs says they have no software mixing, they do. And just copy/pasting from that post suddenly made it possible for my one hardware channel card to share.

Worth a try? Hope it helps, it sure helped me. :)

(Of course, some modification might be necessary for other distros).

First of all, Ubuntu's KDE isn't that bad. Secondly, have you ever tried MEPIS?

It's odd you say that. I tried Ubuntu and find that almost all of the packages I find useful are already there. Anything off the beaten path, however, and you're right. Still, even some of those (like FreeNX) have been brought over to some of the extra warty repositories.