Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out

Many readers are sending the news that Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon has been released. Download options include mirrors and torrents. Wired has a review based on the release candidate: "Gamers and hardcore media hounds may still feel left out... but we found playing music and watching movies in the new Ubuntu to be every bit as pleasant as it is under OS X or Windows... Wi-Fi, printing, my digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after installation — no drivers or other software required... I did have to install additional codecs to get MP3 and Windows Media Audio support."

Comments

What?

[3p1ph4ny]

TFS: hardcore media hounds may still feel left out...

Amarok. There's nothing like it on any other platform.

Re:What?

[ben kohler]

amarok is great, unless you consider "media" to include anything but audio

Re:What?

[deftcoder]

Agreed!!

Amarok + www.last.fm account = tons of great music + great music recommendations!

Re:What?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Amarok. There's nothing like it on any other platform. Well not exactly, you can run it on Mac OS X via the X11 layer, and it'll be available for Windows starting with version 2.0.

Re:What?

[DuncanE]

Yeah, but what about us gamers. I still boot into windows everyday at home. Most of the time I'm browsing the web (Firefox), playing media (VLC) or using office software (OO), but every day or so I want to start a game (currently Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes). While the browser and the office stuff runs fine under Ubuntu, the games don't.

So while I can compile Kernels and grep across the OS in too many ways to remember... I still boot Windows.

I don't really have a solution. MS seems to have the games all locked up. WINE is making slow inroads but with the arrival of DirectX 10 they are another gen behind.

And why are games REALLY important? Because if I boot to windows then what am I gonna recommend to my family and friends?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing quite like it.

Except it reminds me too much of iTunes in terms of interface. Don't care for either.

Winamp/XMMS (depending on platform) work quite nicely, have fairly slim requirements as media players go, and IMO, look good without taking up scads of screen real-estate.

Dyslexics question:
Which end is the gust coming out of the gibbon?

Re:What?

[Constantine XVI]

Banshee and Rythymbox (the default GNOME app) have Last.fm support

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amarok. There's nothing like it on any other platform.
Try exaile if you use gnome or xfce.

Re:What?

[Xiph]

You're not the only one.

Re:What?

[curecollector]

I understand the perspective of focusing on one thing (music, in this case), and doing it well, instead of creating a bloated jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none app. However, after getting an iPod, and managing it primarily via Amarok, it would be nice if Amarok handled video, as it's a nuisance to load gtkpod and endure a re-scan of the iPod's contents (as I don't manage my music with it) just to add a video. Especially in a KDE environment. On a side note, it's also pretty annoying that I can transfer album art via Amarok, and it appears on the unit, but photos transferred via gpixpod don't seem to appear on my 5.5-gen video iPod. If functionality/stability doesn't suffer, I'd love to see future versions of Amarok broaden their focus to personal media player administration.

Re:What?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

It depends on the games. If you want to run the newest stuff then yeah, you're kinda stuck. For older games there are a number of options.

- For DOS games DOSBox is an easy solution. Should work every time.

- For Windows games you've got WINE. If your game doesn't work then the next port of call is...

- Virtualisation. Set up a virtual machine, install Windows, and run your games from there. Speed is an issue, but if you're running a newish multi-core CPU then I would imagine it isn't such a problem (unfortunately my Ubuntu box runs off a Sempron 3100+ so I can't test that theory myself). In any case even on my rather modest machine I can run Win9x-era games without much trouble. Obviously the drawback is that you need to own Windows in order to install it on the virtual machine - but anyone who's owned a PC in the last 12 year has a copy of Windows at their disposal. At an idealogical level it's not much of a solution since you need to own Windows, but from a practical standpoint it can be very useful for a large subset of games. At the very least, "booting" to the Windows desktop in 10 seconds while still have ready access to your Linux desktop sure as hell beats dual-booting.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Because if I boot to windows then what am I gonna recommend to my family and friends?

Windows, presumably. If you're any kind of friend you wouldn't burden them and corrode their soul with Linux.

Re:What?

[SpiritGod21]

Also, Cedega. I subscribe for the sole reason of furthering gaming on Linux. The more support they get, the better games will work on Linux.

Re:What?

[Kjella]

WINE is making slow inroads but with the arrival of DirectX 10 they are another gen behind True, but the first DX10-only game is also years off, if ever. And so far the verdict have been "yeah, better graphics but slower... so you have to turn down the detail level to get the same FPS, making the difference very very small".

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just set up an Ubuntu machine to use solely as a multimedia center. I'm running MythTV with the ubuntu-mythtv-frontend package, it's pretty slick.

There's no reason for media junkies not to use Ubuntu. Just add the Medibuntu repo and you're good to go.

Re:What?

[vrmlguy]

A couple of ideas, but I don't know if you'll like either of them.

First, I tend to skip the cutting edge games. Too many times I've been sucked in by things that just aren't any good, so now I don't play anything unless it's been on the shelf for a year. This automatically solves the WINE problem.

Another idea is to boot Windows and then run your favorite flavor of Linux in a VM. Some hypervisors let you run a client in full screen mode with excellent performance; until you hit a hot-key, you (and your friends) will never know you're in a VM. When you want to play a game, suspend the VM to disk and have at it. Windows is pretty stable if you aren't using it for anything ;-) and suspending your VM will save you if it crashes during a game.

A variation on that last idea (which I haven't tried, YMMV) is to run a minimal Windows (perhaps built using Bart PE), and use it to run both a Linux VM (for work) and a full blown Windows (for play). VMware Player is getting pretty good at passing through DirectX commands from the guest OS to the hosting OS, so your game may be perfectly playable even in a VM.

Re:What?

[Jeff Carr]

A partial, eventual solution to this is to support Linux and independent gaming. For example the expansion to Dominions3 came out today and is for sale at Gamer's Front. Dominions is a fantastic strategy game, I can play it in Linux (or Mac & Windows), it's from a small independent game company, and it's for sale by Gamer's Front (who support independent games).

Win, win, win, win...

It's a bit pricey retail ($54), but comes with a 300 page manual, and the coupon "DOM3-STARDOCK" will get you 20% off until November 15th, making it quite reasonable..

I'm not affiliated with them, it's just pretty much the only game I bother to play these days.

Re:What?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I don't really have a solution. MS seems to have the games all locked up. WINE is making slow inroads but with the arrival of DirectX 10 they are another gen behind.

In other words, you're too lazy to dual-boot (or don't know how?), so you stay on Windows all the time just in case you might want to play a game -- every day or so.

Also, there are games which work fine on Linux. You've chosen a couple that don't.

What's really confusing, though, is that you're worried about DirectX 10. Keep in mind, most games don't support it, and Windows XP doesn't support it. With all we've been hearing about Vista, you'd really rather run Vista than Linux?

What I do: The games I can play on Linux, I play on Linux. Then, once a month, I go to a LAN party and boot Windows. At work, I run Windows most of the time, due to having to run a few Windows apps almost all the time -- yet I do still actually have a good reason for virtualizing it, as soon as I get around to it.

Re:What?

[pipatron]

You mean it would be nice if the manufacturer of your hardware media player made sure it worked on the computer you use?

Re:What?

[should_be_linear]

And why are games REALLY important? Because if I boot to windows then what am I gonna recommend to my family and friends?

Playstation 3! Unless they want boot to Vista too.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

You mean it would be nice if people would buy hardware media players that worked on the computer they used?

Last I checked Apple doesn't support Linux. If you bought an iPod, you knew it didn't support Linux, so why did you buy it?

This is akin to the people that buy houses next to airports then complain to the city about the noise.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop. I use VirtualBox to create a Windows XP virtual machine from the system discs that came with the laptop. It works great and I never have to leave Ubuntu.

Now, if you're one of those power gamers who must-get-every-ounce-of-performance-from-my-hardware-no-matter-what kind of guys, then, just boot into Windows XP and forget about Linux.

Re:What?

[jmac1492]

Huh? Halo 2 for PC requires it.

Re:What?

[ribo-bailey]

Except it's bloaty, crashy, and an ugly UI. I'll take mpd and any of it's various clients over amarok any day.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You underestimate the progress Wine has been making. I too am currently playing Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander, and they run better on my Gentoo install than they do with many of my friends' XP systems. Admittedly, they've been in a playable state for only about two months now, but for example C&C 3 worked great the day it was released. Also, Wine has already started it's DX10 implementation, and as that progresses, it'll make linux "instantly" a superior platform for gaming when compared to XP. If you want to play games on linux, than try them with wine, see what doesn't work and post a bug report. Until linux gains enough market share to attract developers, that's the best thing you can do.

Re:What?

[Spokehedz]

No, this is akin to people who buy iPods and expect them to be any good with software other than iTunes.

iPod has one thing going for it: iTunes. Other than that, the actual hardware is mediocre at best when it comes to MP3.

*** AND NOW FOR THE JOKES ***

I record on water. It is the most natural, pure, analog sound. It's also the most brutal format know to man.

Re:What?

[brunascle]

virtualisation? are they actually any virtual machines that support DirectX/OpenGL from a linux host? last time i checked there werent.

if there were, it'd wonderful.

Re:What?

[hr.wien]

No it doesn't. It requires Vista, but uses DX9.

Re:What?

[supermank17]

Is amarok really that good? The last time I used it a couple of months ago, I wasn't particularly impressed with it; it just seemed like a generic media player. Is there some functionality I missed that makes it really cool?

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Why would you buy an iPod and expect it to work with something else? Look at Apple's website, look at the box, google "iPod linux".

Tech specs on Apple's site:
Mac system requirements
* Mac OS X v10.4.8 or later
* iTunes 7.4 or later5

Windows s
* Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later
* iTunes 7.4 or later

I don't see a Linux option.
I don't see a "non iTunes" option.
And apple sells the whole package as they do with everything they sell.

Off topic----
Note: I am an Apple user. I have both a MacBookPro and a Debian server. I tried for the longest time to get stuff onto my iPod from the debian server since that's where my music resides. I couldn't find any command line programs to do it. I even had conceptualized a nice little bash script that after I plugged my iPod in, I'd run it and it'd sync everything. I gave up and just use iTunes over an NFS share over Wireless, sure it takes a while but I set it before I go to bed. (Initial sync was over ethernet).

Where are all the linux developers making nice stable non 'flair' programs? Why can't someone make a nice stable cli interface to the iPod and then write a GUI wrapper around that? I've been looking *forever* for CLI RSS torrent grabber. It doesn't even have to be a program, just a simple script will due. OS X has a nice program called TVShows.app, it's just a nice GUI wrapped around a ruby script that reads an XML file. I tried but the script doesn't run under Debian. Shiny programs are nice to keep up with the OSX/Vista crowd but what happened to the developers that make good dependable programs for the command line?

Re:What?

[sqldr]

*** AND NOW FOR THE JOKES ***

"SCO".

ahahaha! hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...

Re:What?

[Methlin]

AFAIK only the installer and Live require it, for non-technical lock-in/forced upgrade reasons only, and can be modified, the game itself does not. Same for Shadowrun.

Re:What?

[darthflo]

I've been looking *forever* for CLI RSS torrent grabber.

It's not exactly natively CLI, but what about one with a Webinterface?
Their website is defunct as of now, but the -b4rt branch seems to be under active development. As far as I recall, both vanilla and -b4rt do support RSS grabbing, so help yourself :)

Re:What?

[rmezzari]

Hummm... "Hardocre Media Hounds"? Looks like somebody found my porn stash...

Re:What?

[petermgreen]

At work, I run Windows most of the time, due to having to run a few Windows apps almost all the time -- yet I do still actually have a good reason for virtualizing it, as soon as I get around to it.
btw MS has done something rather sneaky with vista and virtualisation, if you want to use KMS activation (which is an easier option for large deploments than MAK activation because individual machines don't have to contact MS and there is no need to request limit increases on your key) then you have to have at least 25 machines running vista direct on the hardware.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Because my torrent client is rTorrent, I can set it up with a watch folder. Currently my workflow (very lame) is:

TVShows downloads torrent to temp directory on my Mac.
Mac runs a LaunchD instance that checks for new files.
Mac rsyncs torrents to the debian watch folder.
Rtorrent starts the shows.

It works fine an dandy as long as my MacBookPro is home, plugged in and not asleep.

Re:What?

[darthflo]

I would imagine it isn't such a problem [...]

You imagine wrongly, then. Most remotely current games rely on the availability of one or more high-performance GPUs which to my knowledge no virtualisation Environment can provide on Linux. VMWare should do rather nicely on Intel-Apple boxes, but that's about it. Even running old games on a Win98 VM in VMWare/XP is a terrible drag if it works at all.

Re:What?

[div_2n]

I was given one as a gift. Now what? Give it back? Thankfully, software easily available for Ubuntu allows me to sync with it. Just in the nick of time, Amazon.com started selling DRM-free MP3s, so I don't need iTunes. I guess it's Apple's choice not to support Linux. I guess they were forced to support Windows due to market share.

Re:What?

[Loosifur]

I sympathize, and up until Feisty I had such a difficult time getting Linux up and running that I never got far enough to consider using it as a viable gaming platform, but over the past week I've had a total change of heart. I use my computer to check email, browse the web, write, store and play music and video (of multiple formats), stream video and music over a LAN, and play games. Lots of games. In fact, I'd say that games account for 80% of my usage time.

I'd been running Vista and it was a disaster. I have an Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX, which doesn't support DX10, so even when I got Bioshock I never really benefitted from that aspect of Vista. Long story short, Vista turned me off so much that I now dual boot XP and Ubuntu, with the idea that I'd use Ubuntu as sort of a project to noodle around with, getting used to Linux in anticipation of XP's future abandonment.

Two weeks in I've been pleasantly surprised by how well Ubuntu works and how much I don't need XP. Everything non-game related works great, and I've even made inroads towards weaning my girlfriend off of iTunes. Wine runs EVE well after some mucking about with settings. I still need XP for Bioshock, but HL2 seems to work fine. I have yet to try BF2142 and I have some older games I'd like to try out but so far I'd characterize it as a net success.

So yeah, I agree wholeheartedly that games are important, but people who ask me for recommendations as to software tend to be friends/family that will subsequently ask me to install and maintain said software, and on that basis I'd much rather set them up with Ubuntu than XP or Vista. With my admittedly limited experience with Linux, I still like that when things go wrong in Linux they seem to go wrong for obvious reasons and be relatively straightforward to fix, where Windows does so much mysterious crap in the background it seems like problems just arise out of the ether. I get the impression that extended use is not intended use, unlike with Windows.

As it stands now, I no longer consider XP to be my main os. I basically consider Ubuntu my "serious" os, and the XP partition as essentially the same as my Wii: a console for a few specific games.

Re:What?

[s.bots]

Media hounds could also be considered as people who want to do any sort of recording. I haven't been able to find a linux open-source equivalent that is as easy to use as Cubase with ASIO and support for the Firepod. That is all that is keeping me from making the full switch to linux.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Why not lots of tools that that do one thing instead of one tool that does lots of things? I thought this was the Unix/Linux way.

Developers could create 5 tiny applications:
ipod_mount
ipod_music_sync
ipod_video_sync
ipod_pictures_sync
ipod_unmount

Each would do what they're supposed to do *very* well. They could have some command line flags that would let you do about anything
ipod_mount
ipod_video_sync -device /mnt/ipod -folder /user/me/Videos/
ipod_music_sync -device /mnt/ipod -file LedZepplin.mp3
ipod_unmount.

Then you could write a nice pretty wrapper around that. In my opinion nothing would be very bloated because each program would do one thing and one thing very well. You also get the nice 'feature' of having command line tools available to anyone that wanted to use SSH or a Web interface or an Ncurses interface.

I'm a die hard OS X fan. It does everything I need to and I don't have to fight it. I also love the command line if there's a way to do it via command line I probably do. My debian server is headless I only have SSH access. I'd love to be able to plug my iPod into its cradle go back to my chair and do everything via ssh. Most new applications I find are KDE or GNOME only. I finally found someone who wrote a nice perl script to convert *.avi to iPod video files. I wrapped that in a shell script to create iPod videos.

to_ipod.sh Transformers.avi Pulp\ Fiction.avi

And in a few hours I have Transformers.mp4 and Pulp\ Fiction.mp4, but then I have to transfer them to my Mac to sync them via iTunes.

(See also off topic rant in same thread)

Re:What?

[ericartman]

Gee Maybe I bought the ipod before the switch to Feisty?

Cart

Re:What?

[rtyhurst]

Ever heard of dual boot?

Use whatever hideous bloated version of Windows you have to to run your games, and everything else on Linux.

That way you support OSS, keep familiar with the apps, and can contribute to Open Source by simply using it.

The main thing I got from the review is that UBUNTU is good, and catching up fast in everything else except gaming and maybe some media.

I guess serious gamers are probably the most demanding of hardware *and* software users... so you're probably down in the queue...

But guess what?

The people writing UBUNTU are probably serious gamers too.

Re:What?

[tommertron]

You know, your comments for me summed up why I really can't move over to Ubuntu or Linux in generally permanently.

While it's nice that you get iPod support out of the box and there are lots of media programs (like Amorak, Songbird, Rythmbox, etc) to choose from them, none of them really handle my iPod as well as iTunes does, for at least my needs.

Just to put it out there, in case and *nix media player developers are listening:

- Handle audio+video in one application

- "Smart" Syncing: Choosing to sync whole library, some playlists. Also choosing to sync all of music, but just selected videos. Syncing just unheard podcasts or tv shows, last 3 episodes of each podcast or tv show, or last 3 unheard episodes of each podcast or tv show.

- Auto-sync when I connect (I know some people hate this but I find it easier to just stick the iPod in in the morning while I brush my teeth and know that it's synced when I unplug it. Speaking of which...

- Auto un-mount after sync. So I can just plug in, let sync, and un-plug.

I can't be the only one out there who uses and likes all these features of iTunes. I really want to live in the Ubuntu world though, especially because most of the media players I've tried natively allow you to transfer music FROM an iPod without too much hassle and from within the media player interface.

This is the main thing keeping Windows my 'production' OS.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Return it? Maybe my family is a bit un orthodox when it comes to gifts but I've never seen anyone upset when you told them you were going to return gifts. I can remember opening stuff on christmas, taking one look at it and telling my parents I didn't like it and it was getting returned for another model/color/size.

My parents, friend, etc bought me a portable music device, tool, article of clothing. I didn't like that specific model so I went and got what I wanted. They still 'gave' me a gift and I still got what I wanted.
However I do remember my girlfriend getting a bit upset when I told her the same thing, maybe it's just the way I was raised.

To each their own.

Re:What?

[curecollector]

I think that you might be mis-characterizing my statement. Nowhere did I complain about the lack of support, or state that I expected full support, out of the box. I didn't. If I wanted that, I'd plug the iPod into my Windows machine, run iTunes, and that would be that.

(When it comes to Linux, I never expect manufacturer support, but am always pleasantly surprised when I do see it. before buying the iPod, I did look into what my options were for third-party support in Linux, and what it can/cannot do at this point.)

So my above post wasn't a complaint, but rather thinking-out-loud about a "nice to have" feature. As Linux support for the iPod does exist via third-party applications, I can't be the only one who is interested in the topic.

Now, if I were to blindly purchase, say, a brand new (but not supported) motherboard, pop it into my case and complain when my Linux install doesn't function as expected, the airport analogy would be apt. On the other hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying "It would be nice to have support for this motherboard in the future." Isn't that how support for some of these devices/components comes into being, or improves, anyhow?

It all begins with someone either saying "I want this to work", or "I want this to work better." Else, I can't see there being Linux support/compatibility with all of the architectures and devices that presently work under the OS.

All in all I'm thrilled about what I've been able to do with the iPod so far with Amarok and Kontact, and to some extent, gtkpod.

Now, if I were to plug it into a standard Windows install, running a current version of iTunes, and it did not function as expected, I would be complaining. (But even then only after a lot of messing around with it...)

So, sorry if my initial post came across as a complaint w/Linux, as I assure you it wasn't.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

And in switching part of your decision wasn't evaluating what would and wouldn't work afterwards?

I buy a sports car when I'm living in Florida. I move to Canada and I'm surprised that the sports car doesn't do so well in the snow?

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Touche, I want the same thing. I just want a linux program that works(tm) with my iPod so I can quit syncing via NFS+Wireless (See the rest of my posts around here)

Re:What?

[Stanza]

Don't forget there are lots of random games ported to Linux, like Unreal series, Quake series, as well as unix native games such as Wesnoth, BZflag, and who knows what else.

Go to http://happypenguin.org and look around.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either use amarok in Ubuntu/Gnome (sudo apt-get install) or if you want something more Gnome-ish then try the GTK based Exaile. From Exailes site: "Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE's Amarok, but for GTK+". Install is as simple as clicking on the .deb link from their site.

Re:What?

[plague3106]

Because people that use iPods don't want to use the command line? Really, why write a GUI wrapper around a CLI when you can write a library that can be used by either a GUI or CLI? I never understood that line of thinking.

Re:What?

[danpsmith]

Well let's see, you could easily use something like rsync, but wait, Apple decided that it wasn't good enough to allow direct access to the drive's music partition. Well I guess _I_ could just use rsync then, because I'm smart enough to not buy apple's products and expect them to play nice with everything else, oh, and I read the box.

Thanks,

Dampy Smiff

Re:What?

[shutdown -p now]

Cedega is getting more and more behind plain Wine lately. They used to have better D3D support, but Wine has it better for the last year at least. The fact that they stole the codebase originally and kept it locked, and now can't properly maintain it, shows.

Re:What?

[hobo sapiens]

Yes, but does it run on Linux?

Ok, that was half serious, actually! Will it work on gnome without having to pollute my gnome DE with KDE crap? In other words, will it just run on Ubuntu _without_ having to install the KDE DE?

Re:What?

[plague3106]

Ya, how dare he not want to waste time rebooting to do different tasks, or wanting to play certain games! He should be happy with those other games, even if he doesn't like them!

Talk about arrogant..

Re:What?

[AvitarX]

What would you recomend as a replacement for the iPod?

I am thinking HD based players?

The iPod looks fairly priced with a great interface (the touch round scroller appears to me to be unmatched, except by cheap looking round plastic scroll disks).

The price is reasonable too.

I will probably get modded offtopic, but I am shopping for an MP3 player and would like to know.

Re:What?

[markov_chain]

Wow, it looks good... in your opinion how does it compare to HOMM3? I've been looking out for something comparable with little luck so far.

Re:What?

[rastilin]

Pure truth. More to the point, even the games they claim to support don't always work properly, I mean, I haven't had much luck so I can only assume other people's experiences differ. If you're willing to spend for the sake of improved linux gaming support. I'd recommend investing in Crossover Office or Parallels. At least once Parallels gets 3.0 out for linux.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, how about http://foobar2000.org/? Amarok is my player of choice under Linux, but I still prefer foobar2k over it, too bad it doesn't run that well under Wine...

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

It manages to not fall over every three minutes. This is considered a feature in Linux media players.

Re:What?

[Jeff Carr]

I like it far more than HOMM3. It takes a bit of getting used to the first time depending on what kind of gamer you are, as there are so many extremely different possibilities, (tons of races, different time periods for each race, tons of different magics, tons of artifacts and items, the only problem I had was that there is no way to create the "ultimate" combination.

Which makes it a game with a ton of replay value.

When you get to the point where you can beat the AI regularly (not easy at first IMHO), multi-player is a whole different ballpark, and strategy is completely different, simply because of the way that people play.

Re:What?

[Dormann]

In other words, you're too lazy to dual-boot ... so you stay on Windows

I see where you're coming from...but how lazy is too lazy? My ideal computer would be downright psychic and instantaneous with any task I wanted it to perform. Is that too lazy? I also don't want file transfers interrupted or services abruptly halted because of the task I choose.

To most people a computer isn't a project to work on, it's a tool to make things easier. You and I aren't most people...but I suspect some folks are.

Oh, and in the self-serving interest of deflecting [-1 Offtopic], I'm also running Ubuntu (and reccomend it to others) specifically because it's the laziest distro I've stumbled upon.

Re:What?

[seandiggity]

Exaile, anyone?

Re:What?

[Risen888]

What would you recomend as a replacement for the iPod?

Check out Cowon's iAudio line. I have an 60GB iAudio X5, and after a year and a half I am still absolutely thrilled with it. It beats the piss out of iPod for functionality (FLAC/OGG/WMA/MP3 compatibility, video, an interface that doesn't suck ass, text file reading, FM radio, audio in/out, recording from radio/audio in/internal mic, and on and on and on), and is substantially cheaper than an iPod of comparable size. I didn't see the X5 on their website, maybe they're phasing it out for the newer models, but check them out. Anecdote: I dropped it in a pile of melting snow one drunk night in my front yard and didn't find it until the next afternoon. Turned right on, no water under the screen or anything, good as new. True story.

the touch round scroller appears to me to be unmatched

I hate them. There is no tactile feedback, so I can't operate it without looking at it, which is a total dealbreaker for me. I bike a lot, I can't be pulling the thing out and trying to look at it in traffic. With my X5 (which has a mini-joystick), I can navigate the whole thing without looking at it.

Re:What?

[caluml]

Amarok + www.last.fm account = a really nice way for someone (*AA) to be able to see exactly what you have on your computer by sniffing your network traffic, or subpoenaing a copy of the last.fm database.

Re:What?

[hatchet]

Heh, still better than windows host... (using vmware)
ubuntu as client is unbelievably slow in rendering graphics (tried simple 2d games), X was crashing all the time for no reason, got loads of sigfaults... and can't even play a simple movie clip on it.

On the other hand, windows xp client can render 2d games reasonably well and can even render some 3D content, can play all media types without a problem. And 100% stability.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amarok. There's nothing like it on any other platform.

Yes.. it's too bad that it has anything to do with ugly-assed KDE.

Re:What?

[Joe Tie.]

There's a line everyone has to face where they decide increased safety isn't worth constantly hiding. If more people actually stood up for themselves instead of assuming that hiding in a cloak of conformity should be the norm, things might be different.

As far as the record industry goes though, if they're doublechecking files on your hard drive against lastfm records, you're screwed already no matter what the results. Otherwise, just because it shows up on there doesn't mean actually having an mp3. The vast majority of internet radio I listen to, for example, scrobs onto there.

Re:What?

[Jello B.]

If I told you no, would that make you switch to KDE?

Re:What?

[caluml]

I'll just wait until Last.fm use SSL for the connection from me to them.

Re:What?

[Mr_Tricorder]

A few months ago I was checking out mp3 players in the same class as the iPod Video (before the most recent generation was announced) and had settled on the Zen Vision M by Creative. From what I've seen, Creative makes really good quality mp3 players, and they're more Linux-friendly from what I read. Also, they have more features and recognize more audio and video formats than the iPod Video which the same price (back in the spring/summer).

However, I ended up getting an iPod Video. This was because I bought my wife a MacBook Pro at an authorized Apple reseller (which she happens to work at) and they were offering a $200 rebate on iPods for college students who bought a Macintosh computer. I really think the Zen Vision M is superior to the iPod Video in just about every way, but I just couldn't turn down a $50 iPod.

Re:What?

[PopeRatzo]

I still boot into windows everyday at home.

It's interesting how this has changed for me over time.

I do media production and have always used either Windows or OSX (or both) for my work, in applications such as Logic, Sonar, Premiere, Wavelab, etc. I had tried several times to offload some of this work to a Linux box, but it had never really worked out for me. Either I couldn't get Linux to work with my pro audio hardware, or the applications couldn't do what I needed them to do. I'd always end up back in Windows or OSX.

After an ugly experience with Vista, that came pre-installed on a high-end box that was to become my primary production system (once I upgraded back to XP Pro), I decided it was time for me to make a serious attempt to do my work in Linux again. I'd lost a lot of confidence in the major players (MS and Apple) to serve my needs over the next 10 years. Plus, I had some problems with the way those two companies do business. So, I took the system (the one that the Vista machine was to replace) and installed Ubuntu Studio (Feisty).

The first thing I noticed was that with only a few very easy tweaks (for DVD and codecs), everything was working. My dual-monitor video card and audio hardware worked "out of the box". The audio engine, Jack, was a little bit of a pain to get working, but mostly because of my own inability to read a how-to, but once it was working, the applications that came (for free) such as Ardour were more than just decent.

So finally, I had a secondary system on which I could do a host of pre- and post-production tasks. It gave new life to a system that would otherwise have gathered dust or have been given to a nephew on which to play games. Every day, I find new ways to make use of the Ubuntu Studio box, and I find myself sitting down at that system more and more often. Oh yeah, I didn't have to pay five grand to buy second licenses to the production applications I use because the ones that came with Ubuntu were free.

So, I still use Windows for the bulk of my work, but little by little, the Ubuntu Studio system is making inroads. I'm losing the uncomfortable feeling of being locked in to one of two companies for my operating system, and I'm less afraid that once Microsoft stops supporting XP, I'll be SOL. The impressive improvements that have occurred in the last 4 years and the great new programs that the OSS community has developed will continue, I assume. I keep hoping that one of the major music software developers will put out a native Linux version so I can make the divorce from Microsoft final.

Hell, I've even figured out how to play Eve-Online on the Ubuntu Studio machine.

Re:What?

[AvitarX]

1) Everytime I look at Cowen it is about on price parity with Apple (80GB $250.00 for iPod right now, in line with USED X5 on ebay)
2) How can you scroll through 400 albums quickly with the joystick (this is my largest concern with non-ipods)
3) How about 5000 songs
4) Last I looked deeply at iAudios you could only browse by directory structure, not database (is that still true?)

I have ripped my collection to .flac (i am not an aidiophile, but don't want to multiply lossy if I need to convert it again, and HD space is cheap).

I am considering
1) Converting to MP3 and getting an iPod
2) iPod + Rockbox
3) Giving up on the concept of all my music in my pocket and getting a meizu 4 or 8 GB model

If iAudio uses a database that allows browsing by album or artist I will reconsider them, but still on pricing and flipping through thousands of songs I am guessing I am uninterested in the joystick. The flash based iPods are even getting reasonable in price.

Re:What?

[DogBotherer]

Amarok may be great, but unless they've fixed the bug that makes it switch back to onboard sound from USB soundcards between songs its pretty useless to me :-(

Re:What?

[scorp888]

A mac?

Booting into Windows via Boot camp is that much faster...

Re:What?

[freakified]

Actually, if you've ever used the latest versions of Winamp on Windows, you'll find it's actually quite a bit like using Amarok. That said, it's definitely the best media manager on Linux.

Re:What?

[compro01]

VMware Workstation has experimental support for D3D.

i believe Xen will work also, but i don't know to what extent.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example of OS X and Windows people leeching off of Linux.

Re:What?

[zdzichu]

They only missing BitTorrent plugin to actually play those recommendations.

Re:What?

[Joe Tie.]

It's possible, depending on how the kubuntu folk pack up the kde binaries. If you're willing to just compile it yourself, certainly. KDE itself is pretty modular, broken up cleanly into different and fairly independent libs. Amarok uses a pretty large amount of the KDE functionality, so you are probably going to wind up with a fair amount extra. I doubt you'd have enough extra loaded to even hit 0.5% of your memory though.

Re:What?

[Crayon Kid]

Wine has already started it's DX10 implementation, and as that progresses, it'll make linux "instantly" a superior platform for gaming when compared to XP.

Perhaps not XP, because it's hard to believe it will fall behind on gaming anytime soon (heck, XP is THE gaming OS for PC). But it would definitely take a swipe at Vista.

Re:What?

[jeffmeden]

Both of you forgot that DX10 will never see the light of XP... If WINE succeeds in a viable DX10 implementation, it will quickly compete with Vista given the truly lackluster optimization that Microsoft has applied to it.

Re:What?

[Seumas]

Of course, Cedega performance is still miserable.

Re:What?

[GamblerZG]

You support gaming on Linux by subscribing to a paid service of a company, which uses proprietary software that emulates Windows API?

Re:What?

[m2943]

Maybe you should just plug it in, like you do on OS X. Rhythmbox will start up and the iPod will show up in it. Just drag and drop onto it. Unlike the Mac, you can even copy from the iPod to the Linux machine.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Ok. iPod plugged in. Where is it supposed to 'show up' at? My ssh session is still just showing:

[~]:user@debian$

Is there a trick to rythmbox?

Or maybe you missed this: "I couldn't find any command line programs to do it."

The debian machine has no monitor attached.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it didn't have anything to do with "ugly-assed KDE", then it would be nowhere near as advanced as it is now - it's KDE's superb underlying technology that has made the development of amaroK to its current state possible.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't see what you're worried about - the RIAA can't sue you, they have no evidence that you didn't buy all that music on CD.

Re:What?

[keester]

Pretty sure that were perl scripts before gtkpod and the like, and that those same perl scripts are still around.

Re:What?

[bynary]

Here here! I have tried and tried to find the "cool" part of Amarok to no avail. Let me know when you find out what all the hype is about...meanwhile, I'll be listening to Pandora.

Re:What?

[JohnFluxx]

Wait, what? You buy stuff from a company that purposefully does not support linux, but then you blame the linux developers for not supporting it?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

If DX10 is perfect (or better) then maybe there'll be competition. Otherwise... if there's even one popular game that requires hoop jumping, or isn't supported, Linux offers no resistance on that area. Think it's safe to say Wine implementation of DX10 will remain inferor for most of Vista's lifespan, if it's performance is similar to DX9

Re:What?

[xoundmind]

Why would you buy an iPod and expect it to work with something else? Look at Apple's website, look at the box, google "iPod linux".

Fair enough. I certainly wouldn't buy an iPod to work with my Linux machines.
But what can I but that supports ogg out of the box and will play nicely with Linux/BSD???

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll see. People keep saying that KDE4 and all of its related applications will be ported to Windows, but the reality is that very few developers in the KDE community care about making a Windows port. In fact, only a relatively small number of projects have developers that are willing to commit to a Windows port. Porting KDE4 applications to Windows is definitely _possible_, thanks to QT4 and changes made in the KDE base libraries, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen for a significant number of projects.

Porting these applications is also not nearly as easy as some people seem to believe. It's not like a KDE4 application can be recompiled with a Windows support flag...

Re:What?

[hobo sapiens]

My dislike for KDE is stronger than my like for Amarok. Amarok suffers from the tallest midget syndrome; it's the least ugly music player for Linux.

I do, however, like gnome a lot, and Rhythmbox is tolerable. I guess I won't be using Amarok anytime soon :(

Re:What?

[hobo sapiens]

yeah, I am sure all the extra stuff won't matter that much. I just don't like having it (all the KDE stuff) mostly cause I just don't know what all it does. Maybe that's irrational, but it is what it is. Perhaps if I understood the role all the stuff I view as cruft played I would be more accepting. Why can't Amarok just adopt the gnome UI elements and provide me with the functionality I want? That's what I want to know. Why does using Amarok require all kinds of KDE crap? That's like installing iTunes on my XP box and having it bring with it half of OSX (quicktime is bad enough).

Re:What?

[sumdumass]

Well, mostly because one can be done today while the other will take time.

And if you can do it today, then a lot of people not able to do the other won't be complaining there there is a need for the other. Now, for people who could do both, I'm with you. But I'm not sure this is entirely possible with some or most people willing to develope.

And this doesn't even touch on the idea of the GPL/whatever license and how it interacts with any proprietary products. I guess the big question is how is one effected by the other and what is the legality of it before and after and does this change in anyway once a license is selected. But you would have similar questions with a CLI app.

Re:What?

[X0563511]

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_X-forwarding

Read it and adapt to debian. All linux sytems can do this.

I know there is an X server for windows (xming) and cygwin will work as well. I'm sure there is something comparable for the mac as well.

Re:What?

[ericrost]

So write one.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Can I detach an X-Forwarding session? It's a serious question. Everytime my network burps X11 goes down like a whore. And if I'm going to be running the GUI from my Mac and have to keep it on anyway, I'm just going to use iTunes.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an iAudio X5 as well, but they did discontinue it, so you'd have to do a little bit of looking to find one.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't mean a thing, except they don't officially offer Linux support. When I went to buy a wireless card a while ago, not a single one listed Linux as possible OS and I guess most of them would have worked just fine... the one I bought did...

Re:What?

[wishmechaos]

Meizu M6, iRiver Clix, anything by Cowon supports flac, ogg and shows up as an external drive.

Re:What?

[0100010001010011]

Links? I googled and googled...

Re:What?

[wishmechaos]

for a GTK version of amaroK, take a look at http://www.exaile.org/ (still missing some features, but it's being heavily developed)

Re:What?

[thsths]

> Where are all the linux developers making nice stable non 'flair' programs?

"apt-cache search ipod" returns a nice list of programs, some of which are marked as command line:

python-gpod - a library to read and write songs and artwork to an iPod
gnupod-tools - command-line tools for the iPod family of portable music players
libipod-cil - CLI library for accessing iPods

Where are all the linux users that do a basic search of the documentation before whining on slashdot?

Re:What?

[TheDugong]

"I couldn't find any command line programs to do it."

GNUpod?

Re:What?

[fimbulvetr]

I'm a bigtime gnome user too, but I've broken down for two things:

#1. Amarok
#2. Kopete

I used to use konsole as well, but then gnome-terminal stopped sucking ass. Installing the libs is totally worth it if you're tired of the pidgen shitfest or annoyed by lack of standard options in the current gnome media player.

Re:What?

[fimbulvetr]

There are games on the ps3?

Re:What?

[AvitarX]

The Zen:M is iPod classic 80GB price for 30GB.

It better have some incredible features for that price disparity.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you never heard of gtkpod?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

- Auto-sync when I connect (I know some people hate this but I find it easier to just stick the iPod in in the morning while I brush my teeth and know that it's synced when I unplug it. Speaking of which...

- Auto un-mount after sync. So I can just plug in, let sync, and un-plug. You could probably write a script to do this, and set a custom udev rule to run the script when you plug in your iPod. If you want to try this and don't feel you can do this yourself you should be able to find a more advanced Linux user who can help you on a Linux forum. Not that I expect you to do this, just thought I'd mention it in case you were interested.

Re:What?

[Knuckles]

http://www.cowonglobal.com/

Re:What?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I stared at your comment, chuckling for a good minute. Thank you!

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is akin to the people that buy houses next to airports then complain to the city about the noise.

Great analogy...Obviously everyone can choose to live downtown, but for some reason there are people stupid enough to buy a house near airports.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why shouldn't i be able to buy a portable hard drive with music playing capabilities and use it as such on any computer with a USB port?

Based on the performance of their current line, from what i've heard, it would more akin to buying a car in one state, moving house and discovering that all the belongings you placed in it have become invisible and any attempts to get into your boot to unload these invisible items will result in them ceasing to exist entirely.

Apple do everything in their power to strongarm users into using their iTunes software, this might be almost understandable had you only rented the hardware from them but considering that these devices now belong to the users why can't they have control over them? Is there a good reason why moving from one machine to another with the official client should cull your music collection just in case you might have tried to share content with a friend?

If Microsoft tried this kind of of stunt there'd be outrage, no one seems to care that apple are screwing their cretinous, sorry, 'loyal' users, i guess it might be because the customers don't care, maybe they actually enjoy getting shafted by jobs...

It seems that these apologist Apple zealots wouldn't care if Mr. Jobs turned up at their house, raped their grandmother and produced an enormous steaming stool on the kitchen table, so long as said turd is stamped with the apple logo.

Re:What?

[StikyPad]

What would you recomend as a replacement for the iPod?

A car.

Re:What?

[Nazlfrag]

As well as the plethora of free packages such as Ardour, there's a few companies around with commercial linux products such as Syntheway who make linux compatible VST plug-ins, for use with FST or dssi. There's quite a few plugins for different architectures out there, here's a decent list. The linux sound architecture has been, well awkward until just a few years ago, but has come leaps and bounds since then. Advances in wine and vst emulation should push it past XPs capabilities before MS drops support, and the writings clearly on the wall for that OS, and as far as I'm concerned Vista is broken by design. Good luck with the switch.

Re:What?

[cloricus]

This is important. People who supported Cedega for the purpose of pushing forward Linux gaming need to start supporting Code Weavers as they are the chaps employing the coders to complete WINEs directx support. And they are giving directly to the WINE community before taking it back for themselves plus pushing their fixes back into the WINE tree.

Most games run better under current WINE than Cedega and now that Crossover is starting to fill the gap we need to stop supporting Transgaming as they don't support the community.

Re:What?

[Rog-Mahal]

Apple may not support Linux, but Linux has certainly taken great strides to make Apple products work with their OS. My IPod works flawlessly with Rhythmbox Media Player (with a few extra packages) and I can even encode music to AAC. I'm satisfied with the work Ubuntu does.

Re:What?

[rts008]

For any of your older games (Win 95-98) give DOSBox and VirtualBox a try- they work great for me and both are just a 'sudo apt-get install' away if you have the all of the Ubuntu/Kubuntu repositories enabled.

The only issue I've had running games on Linux (Kubuntu 7.04) have to do with glacial framerates due to my ATI vid card and the sucky drivers for same. I'm really looking forward to ATI's getting with the Linux program soon. (I've heard they will make it happen, but still waiting....)

BF2142...Uhmm, good luck with that. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall it needing WinXPSP2 as one of it's requirements. This could be a stretch for Linux for a while.

I was a sniper and chopper pilot of some renown in Desert Combat (mod of BF1942), and made a lot of maps (coop/single player and conquest) for both BF1942 and Desert Combat when I still dual booted between Kubuntu 6.10 and WinXP Pro. When I went to Linux only, I had moved all of my maps and tools to my wife's WinXP machine. Unfortunately, the vid card (nVidia TNT64/32 MB AGP) wasn't enough for the tools- Battlecraft especially, but would at least run the game if I turned the eyecandy down.

My point is: gaming on Linux can be tricky, and sometimes VERY limited depending on your vid card/chip. nVidia can work well (so I've heard), Intel's chips seem to work really nice, but with ATI, you have a darn near impossible time getting any kind of hardware acceleration.

ATI example: with CentOS4, Fedora Core4 and 5, Mandrake 9.0, and Ubuntu 5.10(?) on a P3 800 kit with 512 MB PC133 RAM, TuxRacer worked great with the old nVidia TNT 64 card. Now with a P4 (prescott) 3.0, 2 gig's of PC3200 RAM and an ATI 9550 256 MB card, TuxRacer (now PPRacer?) only gets about one frame every several seconds- totally unplayable.

As to your 4th paragraph....ROCK ON, DUDE! that's the same way I go about it and have converted quite a few users to Ubuntu from Windows- they are even HAPPY now!
I work on PC's as a second job, and have gotten to the point of turning down Windows PC's except for some of my old customers- I just do not take on any 'my computer is running so slow, and what are all of these pop-ups about' type jobs anymore unless they agree to either a *nix install, or have their WGA approved Windows OS disc for a format/fresh install. I have decided that I don't want the money enough to deal with Windows other than a format and fresh install, and have further decided that Win Vista shall never enter my house or especially, my network.

I put up with my wife's WinXP ProSP2 (fully and currently patched, with current AV (Avast), Spybot Search and Destroy and their Tea Timer running with nightly scans (all current updates-nightly before the scans), Lavasoft's AdAware- updated and ran every night, Windows Defender, XP's firewall (has been configured as tight as practical *sigh*),and ZoneAlarm's firewall (active, restrictive settings, and current) because she seems determined to resist *nix assimilation, but that's probably my fault!

Never forget Google and the Ubuntu forums for info- they are your support friends. Other than ATI's crappy Linux support, I have found (easily) the solutions to any glitches that have reared their ugly head.

Side note: so far Automatix2 has worked great for me, but YMMV. Games are the only area I have found to be a hassle with Linux, but if ATI delivers....We'll see, but it sounds good.

Re:What?

[m2943]

Yes. You have several choices

* enable desktop sharing on your Gnome desktop, run the desktop on the console, and connect with a VNC viewer

* run a VNC server (tightvncserver) on the machine and connect with a VNC viewer (put your startup information into ~/.vnc/xstartup); you get to choose size and depth of the desktop, and you can even do this on headless machines

* run xmove (tricky to configure)

The first choice is the consumer-friendly one and trivial to do (it's basically the same as desktop sharing on the Mac, including using the same protocol).

You can either connect to the VNC server port directly, or you can use ssh port forwarding to connect.

Note that this also works the other way around, since the Mac also uses VNC for desktop sharing. So, you can use your Mac as a jukebox for playing all those nasty DRM'ed iTunes songs, and use a nice, user-friendly Linux machine as your desktop.

Re:What?

[Cairnarvon]

That's the main problem I've always had with Cedega, even ignoring the fact that the software just seems to suck.

There's also the greater risk involved with compatibility projects like Cedega and Wine. If every Windows app can also run on Linux machines, why would anyone develop native Linux apps, since they'd just be cutting into their potential audience?
This is one of the things that killed OS/2 as well.

Re:What?

[richlv]

actually, everybody can see what you are playing on last.fm website anyway, without needing to subpoena or whatever :)

ok, not a complete history, but bunch of recently played tracks and historical stats - so that's pretty much anyway.

Re:What?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

We'll see. People keep saying that KDE4 and all of its related applications will be ported to Windows, but the reality is that very few developers in the KDE community care about making a Windows port.

Seems the Amarok developers are one of those that do though, as a Windows port has already been announced, and all the way back in April at that.

Re:What?

[Risen888]

How can you scroll through 400 albums quickly with the joystick (this is my largest concern with non-ipods)

It's surprisingly fast, just hold down and let it fly. You don't have to "click click click," just click and hold. It's a little less quick to scroll when music is playing, but still more than satisfactory. The only time it'll ever really slow up on you is on startup if you've added a bunch of stuff, but once the scan is done it's business as usual.

How about 5000 songs

I have 8000+ on mine (mostly in ogg with some in flac), and there is no noticeable lag.

Last I looked deeply at iAudios you could only browse by directory structure, not database (is that still true?)

Yes, this is true for at least the X5, I'm not sure about other models. This doesn't bother me because I'm obsessive about my directory organization, but I could see it being an irritant for some people.

If iAudio uses a database that allows browsing by album or artist I will reconsider them, but still on pricing and flipping through thousands of songs I am guessing I am uninterested in the joystick.

I find myself doing that with iPods too, though, and I find it much more irritating to have to flip through 5000 songs with the wheel.

That tends to be what it comes down to with me and the iPod; I just hate the interface. It makes no sense. Just last night at my girlfriend's place, I was trying to navigate her iPod to play an album, and I kept hitting the "right" button to go into an artist, and it wouldn't go. She had to come over and hit the middle button for me. Okay, there's a goddamn right arrow on the screen next to the artist name, and I'm not supposed to hit the "right" button? WTF?

Re:What?

[tommertron]

I would actually love to learn how to write a script to do this. I've been meaning to learn some coding to help hammer out some issues I think exist with Linux adoption.

Any help/resources you could provide me with would be greatly appreciated.

Re:What?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I also don't want file transfers interrupted or services abruptly halted because of the task I choose.

That much is fair. I suppose I'm unique there in that I have another machine set up as a server (fileserver, among other things), so I can simply tell it to download something, then reboot my desktop (gaming machine) as many times as I want.

Being able to do it all on one OS is certainly preferable, but I decided that Ubuntu was worth the hassle (though I did already have that other box).

I'm also running Ubuntu (and reccomend it to others) specifically because it's the laziest distro I've stumbled upon.

I do, because it's that lazy, but also because when I want to get under the hood, I can. A Debian base isn't bad.

I used to use Gentoo, but I found that I really don't give anything up by going to Ubuntu, and I gain laziness. However, going to Windows, I do lose a lot, and I am far too lazy to spend much time trying to make my Windows work as well as my Linux did -- in the places where that's even possible.

Re:What?

[geminidomino]

Where are all the linux users that do a basic search of the documentation before whining on slashdot? Mutually exclusive with the subset that pays extra for substandard capability + trendiness.

Smart enough to RTFM = Too smart to fellate King Steve.

Re:What?

[X0563511]

Hmm that is a good question, one that I can't answer. The better solution is to run an X server exported as VNC rather to physical devices. I know suse's SaXII sets up VNC as an alternative display, keyboard, and mouse, and it would be easy to take that configuration and remove the physical devices.

Re:What?

[cytg.net]

Im there with you.. however i must still boot into XP for my counterstrike source experience .. i have it running through wine, but its just so much smoother and lagfree in XP wich of course sucks. I blame valve..

Re:What?

[lanc]

VNC? (yes, you can)

IU Mirror

[cow ninja]

Indiana University's mirror is still going strong:
ftp://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/pub/linux/ubuntu-releases/7.10
- or -
http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/ubuntu-releases/ (separate server)

Ubuntu release days are fun for mirror operators. It lets us test our hardware and bandwidth.

(Internet2 connected)

Re:IU Mirror

[DaveCar]

Indiana University's mirror is still going strong:

Not for long ...

Re:IU Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

If I go to the first link I get between 5-8M/s download speed, from the second link I only get between 60k to 120k (average probably 80k) download speed, (I'm at a University that is connected to Internet2 and my current computer is connected at 1Gb to our campus network.) I'm sticking with the first link.

Re:IU Mirror

[Moixa]

YEAH LET'S SLASHDOT THEM so nobody can download Gutsy

Re:IU Mirror

[nfsilkey]

iu.edu doesnt appear to grok I2 (at least from what hops are returned in traceroutes from utexas.edu to iu.edu).

Re:IU Mirror

[BacOs]

That's odd, considering the Abeline NOC is at IUPUI (Indiana University/Purdue University at Indianapolis) in Indianapolis.

Re:IU Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the iu.edu servers are on the Bloomington, IN campus. One would expect they would be reachable though.

Re:IU Mirror

[tzot]

Just get the torrent, people. That is the whole point of torrents, isn't it?

Re:IU Mirror

[nschubach]

I thought they were for porn and warez?

Re:IU Mirror

[Culture20]

If you're on I2, the torrent is slower. Also, I know that for me at home, the torrent is slower than downloading the iso from ftp.ussg.iu.edu too.

Re:IU Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

>I thought they were for porn and warez?
I thought it was porn, warez, music, movies and television shows?

Re:IU Mirror

[Punker22]

For sure, lighttpd/rsync/vsftpd is still holding up on ours... for now anyway lol http://ubuntu2.sourcemirrors.org/ rsync://ubuntu2.sourcemirrors.org/ubuntu-iso ftp://mirror2.sourcemirrors.org/pub/linux/ubuntu/

Re:IU Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

f you're on I2, the torrent is slower.

No shit? Wow.

Re:IU Mirror

[tzot]

And if you work at Canonical, you don't have to download anything, you take the CD/DVD with you leaving the office.

In the middle of a discussion about finding a non-overloaded server, I suggested to use torrents. Others, too, did as I did. For many people it wasn't obvious that they could download Gutsy through torrent.

May I assume that your own useful suggestion is "get on I2" instead? If yes, do you have info on cost/time needed? If I apply for I2 now, will I get on I2 and download the ISO image in less time than starting a torrent now?

Internet traffic spike

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like big sections of the various Internet backbones are going to be saturated for a couple days :-/

Re:Internet traffic spike

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the torrent tracker appears to be down.. gentlemen, is this the first time a tracker has been slashdotted? Or is it just down anyway?

Just do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo update-manager -d

to upgrade.

Re:Just do ....

[adyroman]

That's probably going to work relatively slowly now, bittorent should be a better alternative for both users and mirror admins.

Re:Just do ....

[ericrost]

I know there are a lot of people who did, because I was d/l'ing some packages this morning to install a plugin and getting shit for throughput from canonical's repos.

Re:Just do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

yea ... it is showing ~ 12 hours to completion.

But it does give a nice GUI automated upgrade path.

I am in no rush, just work away while it happens in the background.

Debian package management at it's best.

Re:Just do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if it would be a good idea to build the torrent protocol into the Debian package management ? That way we could get the best of both worlds, fast download on days like these and and great package management.

Re:Just do ....

[speaker of the truth]

Do you really need to enter the command line to simply upgrade without downloading the ISO? If so I have my doubts as to how newbie friendly Ubuntu truly is.

Re:Just do ....

[websitebroke]

In Xubuntu:

Applications->System->Upgrade Manager

Click on upgrade distribution.

Done.

Re:Just do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It'll pop up with an automatic "distro upgrade" notice from time to time. All the user has to do is click and then type in their password.

Re:Just do ....

[notthe9]

Do you really need to enter the command line to simply upgrade without downloading the ISO? If so I have my doubts as to how newbie friendly Ubuntu truly is.

Nope. The update-manager app can do it, and can be launched from menus. Further, if you have it looking for updates automatically it will tell you that you have something by showing up in the system tray, and offer you to click a button to upgrade to the new release if you care to.

That being said, being able to click a button somewhere to upgrade your operating system isn't much of a requirement for user-friendliness. If someone is very clumsy with computers, there's no harm in staying with 7.04. I've seen the Ubuntu community gladly help people running versions 2.5 years old. If it ain't broke, no need to fix it.

Re:Just do ....

[AmaDaden]

No you don't. I did the last update through 'Synaptic Package Manager', it's basically a GUI for apt-get. Most 'hardcore' Linux people will ignore a GUI if there is a perfectly good command line for it. So when you ask how to do something you get a quick command and not how to find the GUI. On that note I welcome the graphical editor for xorg.conf with this version of Ubuntu

Re:Just do ....

[LuckyStarr]

Now that would be neat.

Re:Just do ....

[flowsnake]

It would be rather cool, provided that it can fall back to a non-P2P mechanism where performance would be unacceptable (e.g. corporate firewalls blocking all bittorrent traffic, ISP traffic shaping/throttling etc).

Re:Just do ....

[jefu]

Could work well - especially if there were a way to compare torrented downloads and direct downloads - so that if there were only a couple of people downloading a package, it could revert to http or ftp.

Re:Just do ....

[russ1337]

....I have my doubts as to how newbie friendly Ubuntu truly is.

Applications->System->Upgrade Manager Click on upgrade distribution. Done.

No. It'll pop up with an automatic "distro upgrade" notice from time to time. All the user has to do is click and then type in their password.

Nope. The update-manager app can do it, and can be launched from menus. Further, if you have it looking for updates automatically it will tell you that you have something by showing up in the system tray, and offer you to click a button to upgrade to the new release if you care to. That being said, being able to click a button somewhere to upgrade your operating system isn't much of a requirement for user-friendliness. If someone is very clumsy with computers, there's no harm in staying with 7.04. I've seen the Ubuntu community gladly help people running versions 2.5 years old. If it ain't broke, no need to fix it.

No you don't. I did the last update through 'Synaptic Package Manager', it's basically a GUI for apt-get. Most 'hardcore' Linux people will ignore a GUI if there is a perfectly good command line for it. So when you ask how to do something you get a quick command and not how to find the GUI. On that note I welcome the graphical editor for xorg.conf with this version of Ubuntu

I get the feeling you were trying to Troll... Do you see the error of your ways now?

Trust me. Ubuntu is very noob friendly. I had to install windows on a machine the other night and I had forgotten just how long it takes and what a pain in the butt it is to install all those extra drivers from CD. Ubuntu is up and running in about 5 minutes. Easy. You should give it a go. You know you want to....

Re:Just do ....

[silent_artichoke]

It would be neat, but would tend to cause problems if it cannot be turned off. At my work, torrent traffic gets you immediately thrown off the network and you have to fill out a network abuse form to get back on. Three apt-gets and I would get fired.

Re:Just do ....

[Randle_Revar]

That was someones Google Summer of Code project. It went fairly well, but one summer of work by one person isn't enough to get it to the point where it can be mainstreamed, and I think work on it may have stalled for now. Hopefully the student or someone will pick it up at some point and finish it.

Re:Just do ....

[Randle_Revar]

I am sure it would be an option, for this and other reasons.

Re:Just do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone, or even a lot of people in your office used Ubuntu, you could set up a local cache of packages on a server, and set your sources as appropriate, so each package only gets downloaded off the net once. Once offices and big businesses start down this road, this would be a tremendous help on their servers, might even be nice if they allowed incoming torrents.

Once there's a reason for your company to adjust, hopefully they do so.

Re:Just do ....

[Inda]

I trust you and you seem to know what you're saying... So help another noob out please.

Can I install this on a free partition on my Windows XP box?

How big does this parition need to be?

Do I get a choice of OS when I turn the power switch on?

Will it run on my P3 450, 512mb ram, geforce 2 64mb? Will it run faster than the install of XP I currently have on it?

Cheers.

Re:Just do ....

[MrNiceguy_KS]

Ideally, it would just consist of a line in the sources.list file. Perhaps pointing to an RSS feed that would offer torrents for any package in the repositories. (Maybe just for any package larger than some particular size. Not really worth using a torrent for small updates, but it could really help when large updates are released that everyone is going to try to download at once.)

Re:Just do ....

[TheThiefMaster]

Can I install this on a free partition on my Windows XP box? Yes, well, kind of. Ubuntu, like most flavours of linux, needs multiple partitions, so your best bet is probably to delete the partition and install to the empty space, allowing ubuntu to create its own partitions. You can install it to different partitions on the same disk as a Windows partition though.

How big does this parition need to be? The website says 4GB of disk space is needed, and 8GB is recommended.

Do I get a choice of OS when I turn the power switch on? Yes.

Will it run on my P3 450, 512mb ram, geforce 2 64mb? Yes. The recommended minimum requirements include a 500MHz cpu, and 192MB of ram, but it'll probably run fine on your slightly slower cpu. An alternate version of ubuntu called Xubuntu exists specifically to have lower system requirements if necessary.

Will it run faster than the install of XP I currently have on it? There aren't any conclusive tests, so try it and see. You can boot directly into ubuntu off the install cd (before installing anything!) but you will have to put up with pauses whenever it needs to load anything off the cd, so you can't use that to test performance.

Your best bet is to install it and find out for yourself!

Re:Just do ....

[boris111]

I am a Linux noob and I can attest to that. I had less trouble with my Wireless, Audio, and even Video drivers with Ubuntu. Although a Device Manager equivalent would be nice to check on the status of them. Only thing Windows did better on was Writing CD's. It just makes a bunch of coasters.

Re:Just do ....

[jcuervo]

Your work sucks.

Re:Just do ....

[Hatta]

Leaving alone the fact that you can upgrade from the GUI, how is providing a simple one line command you can copy and paste into a terminal without having to understand anything not user friendly? How could anything be simpler? If anything I'd say a clicky GUI where you have to go searching through menus is more complex.

Re:Just do ....

[ericrost]

http://wubi-installer.org/

easy as pie (granted I haven't done it, but its supposed to be slick)

Re:Just do ....

[Hatta]

If I use bittorrent, can I still update in place with upgrade-manager? Or do I have to burn the CD, boot to it and go through the whole installing process again? There ought to be a way to add the CD to my sources.list right?

Re:Just do ....

[Cro Magnon]

When I installed Ubuntu about a month ago, I used an old CD from someone who decided not to install Linux, and one of the first things it did after installing was give me the choice to upgrade to 7.04. You don't need the command-line. You don't even need to know what you're doing. Just point & click. :)

Re:Just do ....

[russ1337]

Can I install this on a free partition on my Windows XP box?

Yes

How big does this parition need to be?

- 4 to 8GB

Do I get a choice of OS when I turn the power switch on?

- yes

Will it run on my P3 450, 512mb ram, geforce 2 64mb? Will it run faster than the install of XP I currently have on it?

- yes it will be faster than XP (It runs just fine on my pIII laptop (compaq armada 110s)with similar specs, but try* the 'Xubuntu' also and see which you like.)

Exactly what ThiefMaster (992038) said in the post above.

*You should just stick the disk in, and it will boot in 'live' mode (make sure your system is set to boot from the CD drive before the HDD). Ubuntu will boot and you can try it out. It will be slow as your running in only RAM. When you click the 'install' icon it will ask you some questions about which partition you want it to install to.. so look at those options and see if they suit. You can actually go quite a way into the installation without Ubuntu having made ANY changes. It will of course eventually ask you to confirm you want to make and write those changes (that is when changes will be made). You can bang out (CTRL-ALT-DEL) up until then and it has not done anything to your machine.

You should note that it will be very slow in live mode, as it's running only in RAM and not writing to the disk. It will also want to format its partition in a file system called ext3. you're probably used to seeing NTFS.. but don't worry, you'll be ok.

Added tip: because *anything* can happen, you might want to back up your important data before hand anyway. This is something you should be doing anyway. Burn your docs and files to CD, or put them on your iPod (if you have one).

Oh, and you'll want to burn the downloaded CD image with nero or active iso burner. (if you get stuck there are plenty of instructions out there on the Ubuntu website)

In the end, the Ubuntu guys aren't into wrecking peoples systems and they've worked long and hard to be friendly to new users.

Re:Just do ....

[AmaranthineNight]

I've done it, because I didn't feel like messing with partitions and stuff for a quick install on my grandmother's machine. It's pretty slick.

And if you need to uninstall/reinstall for any reason, it's just as easy. I'd recommend anyone give it a shot if partitioning, etc. etc. seems like a nuisance or just too daunting.

Re:Just do ....

[geekboy642]

To you it's the simplest thing imaginable, yes. I like a console for power, and I always watch the info/error log when something is installing.

But, consoles scare non-techy people. My wife, for one of 'em. Show her a command line and she only remembers being annoyed at DOS when she was trying to play Oregon Trail in school. Point and click is EASY. This is an entirely different mindset, and you really have to live with somebody who has it to be able to understand it.

Re:Just do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did slashdot become ubuntuforums.org you fucking idiots.

New logo?

[BlackPignouf]

Hey!

I didn't know that Ubuntu's new logo was a red spiral!

Re:New logo?

[Parag2k3]

Go go Debian based distro!

Re:New logo?

[AmaDaden]

Ubuntu is a shoot off of Debian. Debian's logo is a red spiral. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LinuxDistroTimeline.png A fun little history lesson.

Re:New logo?

[Big Nothing]

Joke ->   *

You ->    O
         /|\
          /\

Re:New logo?

[6Yankee]

That's not a spiral - that's gibbon-guts!

Re:New logo?

[edbob]

The Debian logo seems to be inconsistently applied. In searching past stories, I noticed that it is often missing from stories about other Debian-derived distros (e.g. Linspire, Knoppix). I have also seen a logo for SUSE even though it is also derived from another distro. It would seem to me that Ubuntu is a fairly major player now and as such should have its own logo like SUSE.

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

this kinda reminds me of a simpsons quote when homer needs to be told it is a joke.

Comedian: "So I finally got around to reading the dictionary the other day... Turns out the Zebra did it"
(laughter)
Homer: "I don't get it"
Lisa: "Dad, the Zebra didn't do it, it's just a word at the end of the dictionary"
silence
Bart: "It's a Joke Dad"
Homer: "A Joke? Oh I get Jokes" and then he laughs

Re:New logo?

[xtracto]

So will that be, THE JOKE IS OVER YOU!!!! instead of on you?

oh and the guy's legs are running away from him .

Re:New logo?

[Warbothong]

Hey! I didn't know that Ubuntu's new logo was a red spiral! No no no, you have it the wrong way around! That spiral is the old logo, just that /. hasn't changed it yet. Ubuntu actually used to be called Debian, and that logo is from them days. Now Debian is obsolete and all of the users and developers are using Ubuntu. ........... /me watches /. get consumed in the Apocalypse of all flamewars.

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

...The joke is over his head...

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. That helped. Please explain the joke too.

Re:New logo?

[MrNiceguy_KS]

/me watches /. get consumed in the Apocalypse of all flamewars. The Four Horseman of the Flamewar Apocalypse: Trolls, OS Zealots, Crack-smokers with mod points, and Goatse.

Wait a minute, how is that different from a normal day on /.?

Re:New logo?

[Cro Magnon]

Meh! That is totally untrue. Debian was obsolete long before Ubuntu existed.

Re:New logo?

[Tibor the Hun]

Cut that web2.0 crap out.

Re:New logo?

[petermgreen]

debian is a solid distro, thier longish release cycles are an issue for those needing to install on new hardware but are great for those who want to set up machines and not bother too much about them. Thier QA is generally very good upgrades from one release to the next generally go very well and the forums are populated by people with a clue. While they do have political problems development goes on forward and shows no sign of stopping.

debian had a bad cycle at just the wrong time, just as things regarding video hardware detection and other installation factors were improving in linux in general debian was stuck in it's longest release cycle ever (nearly 3 years).

Re:New logo?

[BrianGKUAC]

The joke was way over his head.

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh and the guy's legs are running away from him . Hey, show some respect. He was a roflcopter pilot in LOLII. He was injured when his roflcopter was shot down by enemy lollerjets.

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

No wonder he didn't get the joke -- somebody shot his head off with an arrow.

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

'tisn't; it's this

Re:New logo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jokes are supposed to be funny.

Re:New logo?

[hawk]

By *design*, actual debian is obsolete by release date . . .

hawk, off to find a debian stable machine so that he can use mosaic . . .

Re:New logo?

[The_Wilschon]

ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!!

That, my friend, is the flamewar to end all flamewars.

The summary contradicts itself

[GPS Pilot]

If you have to install additional software to get MP3 support, the music-playing experience is, almost by definition, not as pleasant as it is under OS X.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, that is the price you pay for living in a country where software patents are allowed. MP3 is a patented format, so you can never truly listen to an MP3 for free. Part of the cost of Mac OS X is MP3 support, same for Windows Vista. A Linux distro can never distribute software that requires royalties, and so, technically, no Linux distro can legally distribute MP3 software in the US.

Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[jimicus]

Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte.

Betamax was technically superior to VHS. How much good did that do the people who bought Betamax VCRs?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[julesh]

A Linux distro can never distribute software that requires royalties, and so, technically, no Linux distro can legally distribute MP3 software in the US.

This is quite simply not true. There is no reason why a Linux distribution cannot contain a disc of non-free software to supplement the free stuff, as SuSE did the last time I bought a box.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

A lot of good, actually. Until Betamax stopped being produced.

Really though, I doubt that Vorbis is going to go the way of Betamax. PNG is a case-in-point: it was created for the same reasons Vorbis was created, and it remains a widely used format (and it is technically superior to GIF).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[MMC Monster]

And probably part of the cost involved licenses for mp3. The question is, will canonical at some point in the future buy a license for everyone who downloads Ubuntu. How much would something like that cost?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[dns_server]

There are 3 distributions with LEGAL mp3 support mepis, linspire and suse (not sure about open suse), there may be more.

These distributions are legal as they do license the patents which can be done by everyone if they choose to pay for it. There is also the legal option of getting mp3 support from fluendo who also has payed the license fees and allows you to download support for free.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

That disc is not a part of the distro -- it isn't on the distribution disc, and that disc cannot ship as part of a GPL package. It is common to maintain non-free repositories (Livna, for example) or sell non-free add-ons (as Mandriva does), but they must remain separate from the distro itself (Red Hat is so worried about legal trouble from Livna that they don't even officially mention it, and it is hosted in France). The GPP's point was that he had to go and install extra software to get MP3 support; getting a non-free disc from Novell counts as installing extra software. The system doesn't have MP3 support out-of-the-box, and it cannot, until the MP3 patents expire.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[kripkenstein]

If you have to install additional software to get MP3 support, the music-playing experience is, almost by definition, not as pleasant as it is under OS X. On Ubuntu it takes about 2-3 clicks the first time you try to play an MP3 (and no additional clicks afterwards). Might not be as 'pleasant' as no clicks, but completely negligible.

What still is an issue is DVD encryption. Sadly DeCSS can't be legally obtained in the US. Much as I am opposed to software patents, some practical solution needs to be given, while we continue to struggle to change the patent system. Paying a few bucks for legal DVD playback in the US seems the only feasible option at this point, and Ubuntu should facilitate this somehow, if only by providing links to third parties that provide this service (e.g. Fluendo I believe were working on this).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Tim C]

A Linux distro can never distribute software that requires royalties

Not true, there are a number of options:
1) Charge for the version of the distro that includes the software, pay the licence fee to the licensor, disallow redistribution of the licensed code
2) Give the distro away for free, pay the licence fee to the licensor, disallow redistribution of the licensed code
3) Reimplement the required code, distribute only in countries with a more enlightened attitude towards software patents (eg the EU)

Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte.

Superior or not, that doesn't help me with all the music I have in mp3 (and no, I'm not about to re-rip it).
The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

He should have said "make redistributable" instead of "distribute".

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Betamax was technically superior to VHS. How much good did that do the people who bought Betamax VCRs? Your analogy fails at the point where you mention people who 'bought' Betamax VCRs. You don't pay for a Vorbis codec, therefore it's a zero-risk thing, making it more likely to succeed.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[notamisfit]

They don't *have* to be separate from the distro -- that whole "mere aggregation" thing.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how Gentoo has no problems with MP3 support. There are plenty of MP3 applications in Portage.

Gentoo, unlike other distributions, actually has testicles.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

"1) Charge for the version of the distro that includes the software, pay the licence fee to the licensor, disallow redistribution of the licensed code
2) Give the distro away for free, pay the licence fee to the licensor, disallow redistribution of the licensed code"

OK, you do that, and if the FSF has no problem with you doing it, then I'll be surprised. You could include it as an extras disc or repo, but not as part of the distribution itself. You cannot make a Linux distro with non-redistributable code included in it, that is the point of the GPL. If you could do such a thing, then Microsoft would be distributing GNU code with Windows, overtly, and just demanding that you not redistribute Microsoft's code. Microsoft does make an add-on calls "services for UNIX," that includes GPL code, but you have to obtain it separately.

"Superior or not, that doesn't help me with all the music I have in mp3 (and no, I'm not about to re-rip it)."

Lucky for you, oggenc and mpg123 can be used to re-encode your music. Actually, you might want to do this anyway, to free up some disc space (I am in the process, because my disc is beginning to get a bit full).

"The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing."

No, that is not true, because out of the box, Windows doesn't have ogg support, so my collection of ogg-encoded music would be difficult to play. Not sure about OS X's ogg support, so I won't comment on it, but it really depends on how your music in encoded. By the way, Wikipedia distributes its media content in Vorbis format, so if you are using a system without Vorbis support, your use of Wikipedia is diminished (this is remedied by the Java media player, of course).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[ILongForDarkness]

Often the Linux community tries to push the open source equivalent on you, ogg. However, with a little bit of time you can find so many alternatives, that the problem becomes information overload, since its all free, I'll take the little bit of frustration, inorder to find the "product" closest to my wish list. Kudos to the Ubuntu distro team, even our head of IT at work (3000 employees), says if he was to replace windows on the enterprise it would be with Ubuntu.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Eggplant62]

Oh noes! I might have to perform an extra step to download some codecs via a very helpful wizard to listen to all my stolded musics! It's tooooo haaaarrrrddd!!!

Sheesh, can ya find something a bit more relevant to complain about?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[lazy-ninja]

Yes, but you try to open an MP3 and it immediately asks "hey do you want codecs so you can play these?"

You click yes, it does some quick downloads for you and off you go.

Seems painless to me. I would rather "pay" a few seconds of my time than $$ for bundling it the OS.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

IIRC, the deCSS problem wasn't a patent one, it was a DMCA one; that is, deCSS is a deliberate attempt to circumvent a copy protection scheme without a contract with the copyright holder. Of course, I don't know if someone also patented the algorithm, which would make it more of a double whammy.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[julesh]

That disc is not a part of the distro -- it isn't on the distribution disc, and that disc cannot ship as part of a GPL package.

Why is a Linux distribution only permitted to have GPL packages? There's nothing in the GPL that requires this (in fact, it goes so far as to state that it _isn't_ a condition).

The GPP's point was that he had to go and install extra software to get MP3 support; getting a non-free disc from Novell counts as installing extra software. The system doesn't have MP3 support out-of-the-box, and it cannot, until the MP3 patents expire.

Why is it not "out of the box", if that disc comes in the box with the software in the first place? And the process is integrated into the installation? When I installed SuSE, by the time it rebooted and brought my system up I had MP3 and MPEG compatible software installed. There's no _legal_ need even to have a separate disc, although SuSE does so for convenience (i.e., so that you can easily make a copy of the distribution without the non-free stuff). A similar result in a single disc distribution could be achieved with a script that made a copy of the disc with the non-free content stripped out.

I think the point is that this is a flaw of the distribution, not a necessary flaw. MPEG patent licenses aren't expensive. You could get discs to retailers with all this stuff included on them and retail them for less than $20. And they would have a significantly better "out of the box experience" for the user who wasn't experienced with Linux.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[BlueParrot]

If you have to install additional software to get MP3 support, the music-playing experience is, almost by definition, not as pleasant as it is under OS X.

So you are telling me that the strongest criticism you have against Ubuntu is that it is hard to do:

sudo aptitude install ubuntu-restricted-extras

The above command will give you support for virtually all patent encumbered codecs, fonts, flash, Sun Java, etc...
Well, if that is the worst disadvantage of it, then I'd say it is doing pretty well. Besides, you known damn well why you have to input that one line of text at the terminal, and it sure as hell isn't Ubuntu's fault.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally off topic, but your sig is wrong. The majority of /.ers probably cannot use, let alone need that app.

Write it for KDE or Gnome, and you'll be closer to correct.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

And, ummm...do you get a complete office suite, loads of other apps, etc., free of charge and already installed, etc., with Windoze or OSX? :-)

Geez, guess you'll have buy, download, install, configure, etc. all that stuff...hmmmm....

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Eric Pierce]

> Every Slashdotter needs this app [mac.com].

Change your sig. Only a minority of Slashdotters can even install this app. Mac only (duh).

EP

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[julesh]

He should have said "make redistributable" instead of "distribute".

I'd say the number of people who care about that are substantially fewer. Most end users don't give a shit whether they can legally copy their OS. They'll either do it, or they won't. Many care about being able to get it free, although I suspect quite a lot would settle for "cheap, if it includes all the stuff I need" instead. And given the number of people willing to make copies whether it's legal to do so or not, I don't see it being a barrier to adoption of a superior Linux distribution that it isn't legally redistributable in entirity.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, you do that, and if the FSF has no problem with you doing it, then I'll be surprised.

Pretty much every commercial distribution does this. Linspire/Lindows was pretty much founded on the idea of including licensed components.

You cannot make a Linux distro with non-redistributable code included in it, that is the point of the GPL.

The GPL only applies to individual programs, not entire Linux distributions. You could legally make a Linux distro with just the Linux kernel, and closed-source userspace.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[kripkenstein]

Thanks for the correction, I think you are right, the DMCA is the main issue here. My mistake.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, while ogg is ok, FLAC, imho, is better

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

"The GPL only applies to individual programs, not entire Linux distributions. You could legally make a Linux distro with just the Linux kernel, and closed-source userspace."

No, actually, you cannot, that is illegal, that is in violation of the GPL, and if you could do that in the past, Stallman would have revised the GPL the next day to stop you. If that type of thing were not a violation of the GPL, Microsoft could make Windows with GPL packages out of the box and it wouldn't be a problem (and Microsoft would love to do just that). For situations where it makes sense to allow that kind of thing, there is the LGPL, which is what packages like libc are released under, and there are plenty of commercial programs linked against LGPL libraries.

Red Hat has acquired many software companies over the past few years, and has had to re-license the acquired code as GPL before including it in RHEL; this requires a large amount of time and money spent having the Red Hat legal staff check everything over. If that wasn't necessary, if Red Hat could legally include non-GPL code in RHEL, then as a corporation, Red Hat would be forced to save money and maximize profit by not performing that check (yes, corporations are required to maximize their profits, by law [well, supreme court decision, which is functionally the law]).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[tzot]

Until Betamax stopped being produced.

You do know that Betamax is alive and well, and still used for quality archival purposes in many TV stations around the world, in cases that digital backups are not considered worth it, don't you?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, perhaps "stopped" was the wrong word. "Extreme decline" better describes betamax availability, in that I have to look real hard to find someone selling a new betamax device.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[mgblst]

Yeah, technically superior. If you consider having two or three tapes for every movie, for a minor improvement in visual quality that you would never notice anyway, being techinically superior. If you think having a more limited selection of movies for rent from your video store being technically superior.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Lumpy]

Actually on my wife's ubuntu box it's no clicks. I turned on preview functions. simply hover the mouse over the mp3 and it starts playing.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[0x15e]

Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte.

Ok, let's briefly go over the list of players I own that will support MP3 without any additional h4x0ring required (i.e., the format can be played using minimal effort and official software):

• The PCs running Windows (obviously)
• Car stereo
• Mobile phone
• DVD players (all 5 of them from different manufacturers)
• iPod Shuffle
• TiVo
• PSP
• ... and I'm probably missing a few. Just about everything can play MP3s these days. It's ridiculous. I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already released an MP3-playing toothbrush.

Ok, and here's what supports OGG:

• The PCs

OGG is really catching on, isn't it?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Thaelon]

The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing.

Only if you use what windows comes with to play MP3s, in which case your user experience may be worse due to WMP behavior. I use winamp exclusively, so for me this would be the same in terms of getting MP3 play up and running.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

Hmm, I don't know, the Vorbis team seems to have found some hardware that plays Vorbis files. I don't see any "h4x0ring" (installing software codecs is now considered a hacker challenge? I know that I will be avoiding what systems you've been using) involved with the out-of-the-box players.

Yes, MP3 is popular, but that doesn't mean that distros should be putting themselves in a legally risky position in order to support it. Ogg is slowly gaining popularity; it didn't reach the immediate success of MP3 because it arrived to the party late.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Boomer_Zz]

Anything that is small and has nothing to lose will have testicles.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[simonv]

sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper fakeroot && sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
I did not say this; I was not here.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[modecx]

Gentoo, unlike other distributions, actually has testicles.

Unfortunately, you have to assemble them by sticking the right cells together in the right order.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[daveewart]

I like the idea where Linux distros *do* include the so-called 'restricted' attributes, such as MP3 support, and the onus is on those users who live in a software-patent-encumbered locality (such as the United States) to *remove* that support :-) In other words, re-introduce the 'non-us' repositories which are enabled by default.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

What still is an issue is DVD encryption. Sadly DeCSS can't be legally obtained in the US.

Just break the law ... everybody else does.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[notamisfit]

Which is why RHEL has always included Apache (non-GPL compatible before the release of v3), openssl (still GPL-incompatible), postfix (ditto), and so on and so forth. (They also included stuff like mp3 support and Netscape back before they got on their high horse). Here's the relevant passage, from Section 5 of GPLv3:

A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ogg" (I assume you mean Vorbis) and FLAC are for different usage scenarios. Vorbis is exactly the equivalent of MP3 usage (lossy encoding); FLAC is for lossless applications. Also, as the GP said, Vorbis has more sound quality/bit than either MP3 or FLAC. (FLAC sounds better, but takes a *lot* more space.)

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Waffle Iron]

that is illegal, that is in violation of the GPL

How so? Userspace programs don't link to the kernel; they call it via interrupts. (And this whole GNU legal theory that API == derived work can't apply because there exist independent implementations of the Linux API implemented by 3rd parties over other Unicies. You obviously can't simultaneously "derive" from more than one work via just a single API.)

Most programs interface to the kernel via glibc, but that's under the LGPL and therefore is not viral for the apps either.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Can somebody please mod this doofus down as flamebait? I refuse to believe anyone is genuinely this ignorant about the GPL.

If you could do such a thing, then Microsoft would be distributing GNU code with Windows, overtly, and just demanding that you not redistribute Microsoft's code

Yeah, or Apple would be distributing GNU code with OS X, overtly, and just demanding that you not redistribute Apple's code. OH WAIT. THEY ALREADY DO THAT BECAUSE IT IS LEGAL.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[yodleboy]

I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already released an MP3-playing toothbrush.

you asked for it... http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/exclusive-video-hasbro-tooth-tunes-mp3-toothbrush-210116.php

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortuneately for us most digital music is not encoded in ogg vorbis

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

DeCSS is available in Ubuntu. You might have to enable one of the alternate repositories though. I think it runs a script to fetch what it needs (versus getting stuff from the Ubuntu servers).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[darthflo]

Installing the additional software takes a minute at worst and you are automatically led through the process the first time you attempt to play an unsupported file using Ubuntu's standard media player.

Now let's see...

Copy of Ubuntu: $0
A minute of time to install mp3 support: $5 (awesome, huh?)
Total cost to listen to mp3s with Ubuntu: $5.

Copy of OS X: $129
mp3 support out-of-the-box: $0
Total cost to listen to mp3s with OS X: $129.

Even if it took you fifteen minutes to read some three lines of text and click two buttons, you'd still be saving many, many dollars. And be getting support for most every other major encoding and container format out there in the process (which, to my limited knowledge, would be quite a bit more tiresome using OS X).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[FunkySquid]

I think you are confusing Betamax, which was a consumer format and is now dead, with Betacam, which is a professional format and is still in use.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[MikeBabcock]

This is completely untrue. You're mixing up non-free with illegal. RedHat doesn't distribute packages that may be illegal to distribute, not because they're not free, but because getting sued isn't fun.

RedHat has long distributed non-free but legal software, not the least of which being Netscape in the old days. Some Linux distros have political issues about distributing non-free software, and more power to to them, but that's not what you're dealing with here -- this is an issue of the legality of the software itself.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[bmo]

"Betamax was technically superior to VHS. How much good did that do the people who bought Betamax VCRs?"

And you think Beta went away?

No, it only grew up to become Sony Super Beta. It's comparable to 1 inch tape. For NTSC/PAL, it's broadcast quality. Before HiDef, this was _the_ standard for electronic news gathering(ENG).

Ogg is simply better and generates less weirdness. To compensate for the weirdness with MP3, you have to make the file twice as big as Ogg. It just sucks that the only player out there that has a decent interface doesn't play Ogg, so there I go making 320 bit VBR mp3's.

But to be on topic, and to steal a marketing phrase from Apple, (donning Nomex underwear) Ubuntu is Debian for the rest of us.

--
BMO

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[und0]

People at Fluendo could probably answer that.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[abigor]

No, you're wrong here. You don't seem to understand how userspace interacts with the (GPL) kernel.

And Red Hat is a principled company that more or less insists the code they release is GPL'd. However, there is no reason, other than a moral imperative, to do so. For example, Suse's Yast was closed for years.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[abigor]

1. No online music stores encode in Vorbis.

2. The most popular mp3 player on earth does not play Vorbis.

3. The most popular mp3 ripping software on earth does not rip to Vorbis.

It is a niche format for niche users, and will be for enough time that recommending it to non-savvy users is pointless and deceitful.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Charge for the version of the distro that includes the software, pay the licence fee to the licensor, disallow redistribution of the licensed code

Unless you reimplemented a proprietary media player, you run afoul of the GPL.

2) Give the distro away for free, pay the licence fee to the licensor, disallow redistribution of the licensed code

Unless you reimplemented a proprietary media player, you run afoul of the GPL.

3) Reimplement the required code, distribute only in countries with a more enlightened attitude towards software patents (eg the EU)

No need to reimplement, just turn on mp3 support in the FOSS player software. Which makes me wonder why Canonical doesn't offer an "EU version", I'm sure once it would be known that it allows hassle-free media playback, Americans would find a way to get their hands on it. It doesn't, however, solve the DVD/DeCSS problem, though I heard a while back that in Finland a court ruled that CSS isn't an "effective" copy protection and thus doesn't deserve protection under the Finish implementation of the EUCD (European DMCA).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[OrangeTide]

Having to go to synaptic, one window for installing almost all the software available for Ubuntu, is not exactly the same as installing additional software on Windows or OS X.

Using your logic I have to install additional software on XP because it didn't ship with 3D drivers for my video card or with WMP installed. Even if it's just part of the normal update/install system that is controlled by Microsoft.

What you can fault Ubuntu for is not making it clear what packages are needed for a specific feature. I would rather see a way for a user to say "mp3 player" and it would show your rhythmbox, xmms, etc. And if you searched for "photoshop" or "image editing" it ought to show you gimp, inkscape, etc.

I fail to see how iTunes and QuickTime are a pleasant experience.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[tepples]

My family has two PCs running Windows XP and a Nintendo DS Lite. All three play Vorbis with no problem. In fact, I bought the R4 expansion card for my DS instead of a dedicated MP3 player so that I could use Vorbis.

iPod Shuffle It appears you may have limited yourself to what you could find in a local retail store. Had you tried online, you might have found Cowon or iRiver products.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[tepples]

IIRC, the deCSS problem wasn't a patent one, it was a DMCA one True, DVD CCA chose trade secrecy rather than the patent system to protect the exclusivity of CSS. But other technologies included in DVD-Video include MPEG-2 video and Dolby Digital audio, both of which are patented and unavailable for royalty-free licensing.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't points 2 and 3 a little like saying the most popular soccer teams in the world do not play basketball?

Maybe you meant to say the most popular music players, etc?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[jimicus]

That's exactly my point.

What's the point in a "technically superior" format which doesn't play on the iPod (oh, only about 70% of the MP3 player market then) and isn't used as the storage format of choice by the great majority of folk?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Risen888]

Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte.

Superior or not, that doesn't help me with all the music I have in mp3 (and no, I'm not about to re-rip it).

That is nobody's fault or problem but yours.

The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing.

Amarok vs. WMP vs. iTunes? First-round knockout. Let's pose a hypothetical: someone who is brand-new to computers (or alternately, brand new to music management on computers) has three computers on a desk. One has Vista with WMP. One has OS X with iTunes. One has Kubuntu with Amarok. Give them a stack of audio CDs and and an audio player that supports both ogg and mp3 (of which there are many, so don't try to jump on that) and absolutely no instructions whatsoever. Which computer do they stick with?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[betterunixthanunix]

"1. No online music stores encode in Vorbis."

Magnatune.com?

"2. The most popular mp3 player on earth does not play Vorbis."

So? That's not a reason not to use Vorbis; that is a reason not to use an iPod (that is, if you are a Vorbis user).

"3. The most popular mp3 ripping software on earth does not rip to Vorbis."

And what software would that be? There must be 1001 ripping programs out that, encoding in various formats. The ripping program that came with my computer rips to Vorbis by default. RealPlayer rips to RMJ (by default, the last time I used it). Windows Media Player rips to WMA (by default, IIRC, it's be a while).

"It is a niche format for niche users, and will be for enough time that recommending it to non-savvy users is pointless and deceitful."

Deceitful? How is it deceitful?

Pointless? Ogg takes less disc space, which could be very useful for a lot end users I know of (whose aging computers are running out of space because of all the music they have; why should they buy a new computer, when they could reëncode that music as Vorbis?). Ogg offers better sound quality than MP3, and there are people who do actually care about that. Ogg is used by Wikipedia and similar projects, so at the very least, people should be encouraged to have Ogg manipulation software (encoders/decoders); once they have that, why shouldn't they start encoding newly ripped CDs as Ogg?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Risen888]

Right this moment on newegg.com, searching for "ogg" within audio players brings up 12 entries, ranging from $29 to $277. My iAudio X5 plays ogg, flac, mp3, wav, and wma. It was not expensive, nor hard to find.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Khyber]

PSP plays OGG vorbis if you homebrew it. My car stereo supports OGG wonderfully but fails horribly at VBR MP3 file playback. Guitar Hero uses the OGG vorbis format for it's music files, so that means PS2/PS3/XBox/360 play it (maybe not natively but the game has the software for playback built-in) Yup, OGG is certainly catching on, you're just not opening your eyes and looking for it hard enough.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Per Wigren]

1. No online music stores encode in Vorbis. Except that one of the most popular online music stores in the world has great support for Vorbis.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Superior or not, that doesn't help me with all the music I have in mp3 (and no, I'm not about to re-rip it).
The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing. First of all, Amarok is better than any media player on Windows or OSX I've ever used. Second, I just don't get it when everytime a Linux story is posted people complain about installing a codec for mp3 - look at Windows and OSX. Windows ships with a miniscule amount of codecs compared to a basic Ubuntu install (video and audio both). In OSX you have to pay for licensed codecs or install the same codecs you'll install on a Linux box. Besides all that, it prompts you when you attempt to play an mp3 and after a click of a button the codec is installed. What's with all the hubbub about a single codec?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[radish]

Lucky for you, oggenc and mpg123 can be used to re-encode your music. Actually, you might want to do this anyway, to free up some disc space (I am in the process, because my disc is beginning to get a bit full).

Transcoding between lossy formats is a really bad idea. Re-rip from source or leave it as it is.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[aulou05]

Lucky for you, oggenc and mpg123 can be used to re-encode your music. Actually, you might want to do this anyway, to free up some disc space (I am in the process, because my disc is beginning to get a bit full).

On that note, it is very easy to do this from the command line. Of course, you'll then need to use vorbiscomment to bring over all the id3 information. Or you can give additional flags to oggenc:

mpg321 -w - somesong.mp3 | oggenc -o somesong.ogg -

Those unix guys come up with the coolest things, eh?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[evilviper]

What still is an issue is DVD encryption. Sadly DeCSS can't be legally obtained in the US.

Neither can (free) MP3 playback, but that apparently hasn't stopped you. I fail to see why you have a problem with one, and not the other.

Ditto for video. Install MPlayer and you get all the video and audio codecs and file formats you could want, and it includes CSS support.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[evilviper]

3) Reimplement the required code, distribute only in countries with a more enlightened attitude towards software patents (eg the EU)

That's unintentionally hilarious. Surely you DO realize that Fraunhofer, the company that primarily owns the software patents, is an EU company in Germany.

I guess they're enlightened enough to operate in a country where they don't have to pay to license software patents, but they're only to happy to use them to force others to pay them... And here I thought 'enlightened' and 'hypocrite' were mutually exclusive.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[lucas teh geek]

so, tell me how i can get this free codec for my ipod/car stereo/dvd player/toothbrush? oh, whats that? I cant? I need to buy new hardware? well shit, perhaps this aint so different to the betamax/vhs thing after all

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

When you try to play an MP3 file in Ubuntu, you get a message box saying that MP3 support is not installed. It will ask you if you want to install it. If you answer in the affirmative, it will go and download Fluendo's binary-only MP3 GStreamer codec. And then you have MP3 support. As far as I know, this is zero cost.

The licence of that binary-only component makes it rather difficult to distribute as a core part of he distribution. So Ububtu are already doing everything they possibly can, by having it install itself the first time it's needed.

Something similar happens when you try to play pretty much anything that needs a non-free or patent encumbered codec (anything from the gstreamer-ugly collection, for example).

In Windows, I need to install extra software to play anything but MP3 and WMA. On Mac OS X, I need to install extra software to play anything but MP3 and AAC / M4A. Windows Media Player has a plugin finder service, which is great and all, but only works for Microsoft media formats. iTunes has nothing. How the hell is a Windows user supposed to know what they have to install to play an M4A file? How the hell is a Mac user supposed to know that they have to download Flip4Mac to play WMA or WMV files, and that they still won't work in iTunes?

The point is that media support sucks on all operating systems, unless you happen to be using the formats that are included with the OS.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[joeljkp]

3) Reimplement the required code, distribute only in countries with a more enlightened attitude towards software patents (eg the EU)

Here's the mp3 patent list. I see a lot of listings for Germany, France, Spain, UK...

What's the deal?

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[joeljkp]

Neither can (free) MP3 playback, but that apparently hasn't stopped you. I fail to see why you have a problem with one, and not the other. Because legal codecs for MP3, WMA, and a few others can be had legally from http://shop.fluendo.com/ (MP3 is even free). I know of no legal source at any price for a Linux DVD decoder.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

>A minute of time to install mp3 support: $5 (awesome, huh?)

Awesome, indeed. Let's do the math, shall we? One minute at $5... 60 minutes per hour... that'd be $300/hour, by my reckoning.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[KingOfBLASH]

I had the same problem as you. Then I wrote a perl script that would execute the shell command find, and run a command to decode the MP3, and recode as ogg. Let it run all night. Problem solved!

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

so, tell me how i can get this free codec for my ipod/car stereo/dvd player/toothbrush? oh, whats that? I cant? I need to buy new hardware? well shit, perhaps this aint so different to the betamax/vhs thing after all

The codec specifications are here: http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/

They kindly provide a reference implementation: http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/

You can get compilers here: http://gcc.gnu.org/

You'll have to dig up the hardware specs for your toothbrush on your own, I'm afraid. Google may be of assistance in this regard.

The rest is an exercise for "teh geek".

Hope this helps :)

P.S.

A word of advice: To avoid frustration when programming, it's best to have a fully functional keyboard.

P.P.S.

Finally, please remember the spirit of Open Source, and release your source code, so that others may benefit if they do not have the same model toothbrush as you :)

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Cairnarvon]

Except that it would be illegal to distribute from US servers, as well.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably should have used DAP (Digital Audio Player) instead of MP3 player, but pretty much all DAPs play MP3s and most people know DAPs as MP3 players, so picking him up on that is just being pedantic as it in no way changes the truth of the statement if you substitute DAP for MP3 player.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[daveewart]

> Except that it would be illegal to distribute from US servers, as well.

Why's that a problem? Just host the non-us repositories on servers outside the US. Most users of Linux distros will use their geographically-close mirrors in any case.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[darthflo]

Correct. I used this (grossly overestimated) number because I assume at least 99% of the world's population make less, so the conclusion of Ubuntu being a cheaper solution than Mac OS X when only considering mp3 playback wouldn't change. Had I taken a estimated salary of $10/hr, this might not be the case. Still, you might criticize this example because it doesn't include the aforementioned 100th percentile of income. I didn't consider these, because I think they are either perfectly able to figure out if they want to use Ubuntu or OS X themselves, hire people to do this for them or don't care about a such measly amounts anyways.

If you earn north of $300/hr, aren't able to figure out if you like OS X or Ubuntu better, care about a $124 difference and haven't hired somebody to ask about the advantages and disadvantages of those systems, you can always hire me (for =$300/hr :))

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[evilviper]

Thanks for clarifying...

I know of no legal source at any price for a Linux DVD decoder.

From about June 2004, Cyberlink has offered a licensed DVD Player for OEMs, and can be found in basically every motherboard that offers the gimmick of DVD playback without booting-up the OS...

It can be found in a few distros like TurboLinux 10. For a couple years there, it was also offered for sale to individuals via Linspire's CNR site, but it has now disappeared.

Funniest thing about it is that it's just a slightly modified (old) version of MPlayer that they've payed licensing fees for. Anybody else could do the same, quite easily.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Superior or not, that doesn't help me with all the music I have in mp3 (and no, I'm not about to re-rip it).
The OP's point is valid - the experience is not as good out of the box as that of OS X or Windows, with regards to music playing.

This is simply incorrect. My music collection is comprised of MP3's and OGG. So, my music experience on Linux will be superior to that on OSX or Windows. One (or two) clicks to play both formats.

How many clicks to get a similar experience on Windows? Bearing in mind that I need to play OGG and MP3.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[Anonymous Coward]

out of the box

hey moron, xp out of the box is pwned in about 37 seconds.

dickweed.

sheesh.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[eddy]

>It just sucks that the only player out there that has a decent interface doesn't play Ogg

My Cowon D2 plays Vorbis just fine, thank you very much. I have it loaded up on 80kbps vorbises (~400 songs per GB).

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[loyeyoung]

You are misinformed on the law and have fallen victim to FUD.

The law permits decryption software to be used and distributed for the purpose of interoperability of software and hardware. The two legal issues are copyright and patents.

• Copyrights: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act grants a specific copyright exemption for this purpose. See Title 17, United States Code, Sec. 1201(f). The best example of such a purpose is to allow Linux computers to play DVDs.
• Patents: If the drive carries the DVD logo from a reputable company, the patent holders have already been paid the royalty for the format. See the licensor's website describing the effect of the logo: http://www.dvdfllc.co.jp/logo/lg_nature.html.

In short, you may play that DVD you bought at WalMart on your Linux computer to your heart's content. You may even keep a backup copy of it on your computer as long as you still own and possess the original DVD.

However, you may NOT use libdvdcss (or any other software) as a device to enable the making and distributing of copies of the DVD or to help others do so. This is no different than using a Windows computer. It is trivially easy to copy a DVD on any computer, simply by running the wires from the digital output of your DVD player to the digital input of your computer. But that doesn't give you the right to circumvent copyright protection.

Bottom Line: Just don't burn a copy to give away. If your friend wants a copy of Shrek 3, you should go back to WalMart, buy her one, and give it to her. (Besides, Shrek 3 was produced with Linux computers, so it's a good way to support the home team.)

Loye W. Young, Jr., J.D.
Isaac & Young Computer Company
Laredo, Texas
http://www.iycc.biz/

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[GaryPatterson]

No, actually, you cannot, that is illegal, that is in violation of the GPL, and if you could do that in the past, Stallman would have revised the GPL the next day to stop you.

Impossible.

RMS could revise the GPL all he likes, but it wouldn't affect the already-existing software released under the previous version. You can't just change a contract and expect to enforce the new version on parties who haven't agreed with it.

I'm not commenting on whether the original post was possible or not, but changing contracts after acceptance is not possible.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[GaryPatterson]

Your music experience should not depend on the codecs you have, but on the music you're listening to.

All I ask from my music collection is convenience, ie close to hand and not to have to worry about codecs or screw around with formats and transcoding.

OGG, mp3, AAC, I don't actually care so long as I can play them on my Mac and my wife can use them in her iPod.

Re:The summary contradicts itself

[GaryPatterson]

How does OGG compare to AAC though? That's where the comptition's moved to these days. In a world of cheap drive space I encode at 256kbps AAC and I'm hard-pressed to hear any difference between that and the CD.

Ob: Bittorrent

[spikedvodka]

As always people... Don't use the download link from the main page. spend the extra time to get a .torrent like [URL:http://ubuntu.gds.tuwien.ac.at/cdimage/releases/gutsy/ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso.torrent]

Currently: 1938 seeds, 4389 peers. and it's going *very* quickly.

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[deftcoder]

Rraaaaaaah! I just finished installing Debian stable ( + full-encrypted disk :o ) again on my laptop.

I was actually going to download Ubuntu, since I like to keep a livecd handy for fixing people's comps, but decided to hold off for Gutsy. I prefer Debian to Ubuntu, personally. :P

I guess I'll install ktorrent now and let her rip. Thanks for the link!

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[ch0ad]

i would but deluge has a nasty bug causing it to max out one core of my cpu :( i cba to set up another client just for this, as as soon as it's downloaded my system will be wiped!

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true gentleman! Also, remember to seed if you feel like it!

+1

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[ls -la]

spend the extra time to get a .torrent Unless your ISP is like my school and limits torrents to sub-dialup speeds.

But yes, if you can get a nice speed on a torrent, do so to keep the load off the servers for us who can't get torrents.

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[tepples]

spend the extra time to get a .torrent How much does it cost to buy 12 months (a common minimum commitment among ISPs nowadays) of Internet access that does not specifically restrict speeds of torrent-like downloads? I'd imagine that it costs more than it would to ship a Ubuntu CD.

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

On that page, what's the difference between "ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso" and "gutsy-desktop-i386.iso"? Which is the release version?

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[Minwee]

Indeed. The message "urlopen error (111, 'Connection refused')" comes up in no time at all.

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[Poromenos1]

I don't know why everyone hasn't switched to BT already. Builtin load balancing, hash checks, file priorities, bandwidth sharing, easy to use... It seems to me that whenever ANYONE has a file larger than 50ish MB to distribute, they should use nothing other than BT. Even normal users, not just companies.

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Because many of us have limited upload rates, so our download rates suffer dramatically. It takes me 3 days to download 700 megs.

Re:Ob: Bittorrent

[Poromenos1]

I don't think you're more limited than my 8 KB/s upstream. Just set a limit, I get max download rates (though sadly this means I can't contribute much)

Has support from Dell and Novell

[ZipprHead]

I'm actually really excited about this. We've got a demo running here. We installed it on a two year old notebook and everything just worked. Pointed Evolution to our Exchange server, and it just worked. Which IMHO is key, I love to hack things just as much as the next guy, but if I have to hack things just to get them to work the first time, its a major turn off.

It's got a slick UI and the package manager is well done.

Add in support from Dell.

All that is missing now is a really awesome developer environment.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[betterunixthanunix]

"All that is missing now is a really awesome developer environment."

I would just cite emacs, but since you seem to be interested in something more...graphical...I'll just list these three:

* Eclipse

* KDevelop

* Netbeans

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[BlowHole666]

if I have to hack things just to get them to work the first time

Thats the same problem I have with my wife.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using Eclipse with CDT to write some C++, but it's "code completion" broke almost immediately and now not only doesn't offer completion, but sometimes offers completely wrong things. It can't jump to function defined in the very same file, can't do that from simple right click, it's message parsing is a bit weird (I had to read whole error from GCC myself to find out what is wrong) etc.
Definitely not comparative to VS.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[betterunixthanunix]

Well, admittedly, I don't really like Eclipse. For Java/EJB, I would go with Netbeans, and for just about anything else, its Emacs or KDevelop (KDevelop for Qt, GTK, or wx projects, especially if those projects are fairly large).

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[stoolpigeon]

You should try out netbeans with the c++ add on. Eclipse is great, but I've been really impressed with the progress that's been made with netbeans. I think 6.0 is going to be phenomenal (it is in beta now).

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Tyr_7BE]

Seriously. I work writing C code all day and you can't get much better than Vim.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[stoolpigeon]

And then there are the commercial offerings. You've just pointed out stuff that is free as in beer. I would think that someone who just saved the cost of purchasing windows who writes code for a living, would have more cash available for a good ide if they found the free options to be wanting.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

* Code::Blocks?

If you don't mind unstable nightly builds, that is.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[mararual]

And also IntelliJ IDEA. The best IDE in my opinion. Of course... it is not free but it's really worth the money. check it out: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

And is Linux supported :D

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Anjuta http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/ is a good one for GTK+.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody who writes code for a living and can afford to buy a commercial IDE probably does not care whether they have to pay for a Windows license or not.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Monodevelop is also nice if you need C# development on a linux platform.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Stamen]

All that is missing now is a really awesome developer environment. I'm not trying to troll, but a serious question: I spend half my day developing in .net and the other half in Java and Ruby, so I use Visual Studio a lot. My question is why do some people say how great Visual Studio is?

I use it, it's fine, although some bugs that have existed since VS 2003 really irritate the hell out of me, but it isn't much greater than, say NetBeans 6 or IntelliJ Idea. It's nice that they finally added stuff like re-factoring (was in IntelliJ IDEA years before Microsoft copied it), but it isnt' done particularly well. Like I said, it's a fine environment, on par with the others, but "really awesome", I'm confused.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[edmicman]

Honestly, none of those hold a candle to VS 2005 for .NET development.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[ZipprHead]

Perhaps I am wrong. But having used a number of other development environments, I've never seen a better debugger. I can be running a 3 tier application in debug mode, tier one a DLL, tier two a SOAP server, tier three a client Application. I can step through an entire request process setting break points at each tier in the application, heck ( though I have to see it) you can even use Visual Studio to step through stored procedures inside of Microsoft SQL server.

There are some things in VS that annoy me too, but IMHO, it's the least annoying development environment I've ever used.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[tlacuache]

All that is missing now is a really awesome developer environment. Check out Lazarus, a RAD suite based on Free Pascal. It's getting awesomer by the day...

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[TeacherOfHeroes]

I'm partial to the Geany code editor. It has all of the features I need, seems to support just about every language you'd like (both in terms of highlighting and running), and still seems very light-weight.

For designing graphical interfaces, it doesn't get any easier than GLADE. No auto-generated code, just an XML file that can be loaded by any language that has a port of libglade, and like that, you have a GUI for your programme.

Both can be found in the package manager, but here are their websites if you're interested.

Geany: http://uanews.org/node/16426
Glade: http://glade.gnome.org/

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Stamen]

Thank you for the response, that makes sense. It certainly is the most integrated environment if you're using all the Microsoft tools from IIS to SQL Server and such. So that makes sense that it works really well for you. And it also makes sense why I don't notice those features, because I'm rarely in that integrated environment, and use Visual Studio only as a c# editor and debugger. A truly great example of why some people really like one tool, and others don't; just different needs.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Alethes]

Don't forget Anjuta for the Gnome desktop.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[SwordsmanLuke]

Don't forget Code::Blocks!

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[shutdown -p now]

On a more serious side, they're not on par with VS2005 C++ IDE, either. The only other editor that I know of which can properly parse moderately complicated C++ templates (i.e. Boost) is SlickEdit, but nothing in the Linux land comes close to VS2005 for C++ debugging.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

"My question is why do some people say how great Visual Studio is?"

I wondered the same thing when interviewing developers from an MS background. They would go on about how wonderful VS was and then be completely blown away when shown modern development tools with good refactoring support (IntelliJ or Eclipse, for example). Most of them who used Visual Studio had never even tried ReSharper.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[abigor]

I use this too, but you'd better have lots of memory to dedicate to it...I have an instance of Parallels running RHEL running most of the time on my laptop with 2 gigs of memory, taking up 512 megs, plus a bunch of terminals, Skype, etc. and with the remaining memory IDEA is a bit laggy at times.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Bright Apollo]

No, what's really missing from this or any other Linux distro is a suitable MUA to Exchange, without using WebDAV. Once I can ditch Outlook, I can ditch the corp OS. Until that day, no dice.

-BA

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[drew]

SharpDevelop is IMO nearly as good as VS2005 (on par with the Express Editions, at least), I just wish that the MonoDevelop guys would catch up with their version. Last time is used it, it was... unimpressive.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[stoolpigeon]

Right - but my point is that it doesn't make sense for that same person to complain about a lack of free IDE's.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Dan Ost]

I agree. I use Vim for just about everything (C, java, Python, etc).

Any editor or IDE that doesn't support vi-bindings is a non-starter for me (Eclipse, I'm looking at you).

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Myopic]

Yeah. Agreed. I've used Vis Stu and Eclipse and NetBeans. You need Vis Stu if you are doing Microsoft dev for a Microsoft platform. But if you're running Linux and writing code, why would you need that? Vis Stu certainly isn't an objectively superior IDE. My fav is Eclipse (the newest version is really slick). NetBeans isn't as good. Vis Stu was medium, with some maddeningly obvious bugs, but not terrible.

Emacs, though, is a laughable example of an "awesome developer environment". Emacs was permissibly usable in the 80s, but the rest of us have gone on.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

vim biatch!

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[Phleg]

Honestly, none of those hold a candle to VS 2005 for .NET development.

Which, in and of itself, doesn't hold a candle to EMACS or Vim for development on pretty much any other platform.

A language which pretty much requires a giant fucking IDE with refactoring support and embedded utilities to do everything from picking one's ass to waxing their cat isn't exactly my idea of something I'd like to use on a day-to-day basis.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

I would just cite vi... Fixed that for you.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[ookaze]

On a more serious side, they're not on par with VS2005 C++ IDE, either. The only other editor that I know of which can properly parse moderately complicated C++ templates (i.e. Boost) is SlickEdit, but nothing in the Linux land comes close to VS2005 for C++ debugging This is nonsense. VS2005 C++ IDE is left behind by these IDE as soon as you try to compile code for a GNU platform, with gcc for example. You're right, nothing in the Linux land comes close to VS2005 for standard C++ debugging, as VS2005 it's just left far behind.
Your statement wouldn't be true, even if C++ debugging was reduced to graphical step by step C++ debugging.

The only case in which any Visual Studio is better than a FOSS IDE is when you're programming only for a Windows platform.

Re:Has support from Dell and Novell

[The_reformant]

I second this. C++ debugging in VS is a breeze. I work on several platforms and will try to debug on windows wherever I can exactly because I can use VS. Closest thing we have access to is Solaris workshop which is probably a decade behind. On many platforms we are restricted to command line debuggers :S

Good

[Colin Smith]

It's been reasonably stable[1] for me recently. The ra2500 wifi pretty much just works. The printer pretty much just works, the apps pretty much just work.

To be honest I'd forgotten all about it, it just gets out of the way (unlike Windows) I think they're really into usability tweaking and performance optimisation territory.

In particular the Window List. I use mine in a vertical panel rather than the more traditional horizontal panel and someone's mucked about with it so that it flips to two columns as soon as I have 8 apps open whether all the space is used or not. Well, this is Linux, people 8 is nothing, I often have 20, 30 apps running...

[1] Where reasonable is defined as 3 nines.

Re:Good

[Abcd1234]

It's been reasonably stable[1] for me recently.

It was for me, too... up until about a week ago, when gdm started crashing repeatedly on boot. I now have it disabled, and must startx manually. 'course, I can't find any mention of anyone else encountering this, and I haven't noticed any updates to gdm or X lately, so I have no idea if it's fixed, yet.

Re:Good

[Colin Smith]

It logs to /var/log/gdm/:0.log by default.

Re:Good

[Abcd1234]

lewl, I've been administrating Linux boxes for over ten years now, I know where to look for logs. :) But there's nothing in the gdm logs to indicate what's going wrong. I've also straced gdm, and there wasn't an obvious hint as to what the problem could be. It's got me a bit mystified, TBH. *sigh*

October 18?

[SpiritGod21]

I've been running Gutsy for a month now (alpha, obviously). If you're trying to decide whether to upgrade or not, I can vouch that it is quite shiny (though the GUI for dual-monitor support fails with my work desktop's ATI card, unsurprisingly). I'm really liking it.

That being said, I've got OpenSUSE 10.3 on my work tablet and it has been fantastic. October's the new nerd-Christmas!

Re:October 18?

[Anonymous Coward]

October's the new nerd-Christmas! New? Didn't anyone ever tell you that 31 oct == 25 dec ?

Re:October 18?

[LiENUS]

That being said, I've got OpenSUSE 10.3 on my work tablet and it has been fantastic. October's the new nerd-Christmas!
Oct. 31 is Dec. 25 after all...

The Linux revolution has already happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there won't be a Linux revolution, we're already past that, thankfully. I think with ~15% of marketshare (yeah, we're nowhere near that, but we will) it will be much harder for Microsoft to continue with their lock-in plans. We are at a point where Linux spreads itself, now we only need to encourage the gamedevs to use OpenGL and the _use whatever OS floats your boat era_ is becoming a reality.

More interestingly,

[empaler]

The Postal Movie premiered today. Yay Uwe!

Re:More interestingly,

[phobos13013]

I take it yr story got rejected...

Re:More interestingly,

[empaler]

Didn't submit one. I dread what Uwe has done to it, but I can't help but want to see it... :-)

7.2Gbps via official torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

I did some calculations from the torrent tracker statistics page

Over the first 3 minute sample I took, I calculated total torrent pool bandwidth at 6.5Gbps (gigabits per second).

About 10 minutes later (as of right now) I completed a 5 minute sample and calculated the bandwidth usage to be 7.2Gbps.

The tracker is going up and down a fair bit under the load, but those statistics should be fairly indicative of the number of people downloading Gutsy Gibbon via the official torrents.

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[brunes69]

If you upgrade via the Update Manager does it use torrents to speed up downloading of the installer?

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[SwedishPenguin]

No, it downloads the packages from the server you usually download updates from.

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[swillden]

If you upgrade via the Update Manager does it use torrents to speed up downloading of the installer?

No, it downloads from your usual update site -- which is almost certainly melted into a pool of slag on the datacenter floor right now.

If you want to update today, or even in the next few days, I'd suggest using a torrent to download the CD. Burn the CD and put it in the drive, then go to "System->Administer->Software Sources", click on the "Third-Party Software" tab, click the "Add CD-ROM" button. This should add the CD as a package source for you. Then when you do the upgrade, it should pull packages from there rather than from the update site (except when the update site has newer packages than the CD, or when you're updating packages that aren't on the CD, of course).

I expect that getting the CD image with bittorrent and then upgrading will be a lot faster than just doing a straight upgrade.

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[houstonbofh]

If you want to update today, or even in the next few days, I'd suggest using a torrent to download the CD. Burn the CD and put it in the drive, then go to "System->Administer->Software Sources", click on the "Third-Party Software" tab, click the "Add CD-ROM" button.

When you stick the CD in the drive it will ask if you want to upgrade and run the script to upgrade from the CD. Why make things harder for your self?

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[Anpheus]

Can't you just mount the image and save yourself the trouble of burning a CD? (Serious question.)

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! With such easy-to-follow instructions Linux is certainly gonna be hit now with the man in the street...

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[swillden]

If you want to update today, or even in the next few days, I'd suggest using a torrent to download the CD. Burn the CD and put it in the drive, then go to "System->Administer->Software Sources", click on the "Third-Party Software" tab, click the "Add CD-ROM" button.

When you stick the CD in the drive it will ask if you want to upgrade and run the script to upgrade from the CD. Why make things harder for your self?

Thanks. I wondered if they'd do something nice like that, but I didn't actually try it. I based my comment on how the tools work.

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[citizenr]

yes you can, im doing it just now

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

Burn the CD and put it in the drive, then go to "System->Administer->...

Actually it's much easier than that.

You just pop in the CD. You'll get a dialog asking if you'd like to use it as an upgrade source. This happens when you put in any Ubuntu-family CD, and probably any Linux iso.

See bottom of page.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[cloakable]

Grab the alternative CD, insert while your system is running, and you'll get a dialog asking if you want to upgrade from the cdrom.

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[bcrowell]

This didn't work for me. When I did "Add CD-ROM," I got "unable to locate package files, perhaps this is not a debian disc." The other replies are all talking about using the alternate install disk, rather than the regular installer, which is what I downloaded.

Re:7.2Gbps via official torrents

[swillden]

This didn't work for me. When I did "Add CD-ROM," I got "unable to locate package files, perhaps this is not a debian disc." The other replies are all talking about using the alternate install disk, rather than the regular installer, which is what I downloaded.

Sorry if I misled you. I stated what I though *should* work (based on many years of Debian usage), rather than what I know to work.

Don't download the new Ubuntu...

[JK_the_Slacker]

THINK OF THE CHAIRS!

Re:Don't download the new Ubuntu...

[Technician]

THINK OF THE CHAIRS!

I work for a furniture company. Do download Ubuntu... Think of the 4th quarter profits!

Re:Don't download the new Ubuntu...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a furniture company, you Insensitive Clod! Do download Ubuntu... Think of the 4th quarter profits! Fixed it for you.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[AnonymousJackass]

Please bear with me -- I'm still on the Ubuntu learning curve... If I do as you suggest there, will that upgrade my "Feisty" to "Gutsy Gibbon" without losing my files, accounts, directory structure, etc? Will I need to reinstall video drivers and reconfigure my screen resolution settings again? (The latter was a real headache the first time around...) I can't find a straight-forward answer anywhere.

MythTV Related Question

[dyslexicbunny]

I'm not really a Linux user but I was building a tivo box and the /. talk on Ubuntu spurred me to give it a shot (I like it a lot). I saw how much easier it is to install remotes in Gusty than in Feisty (not as terminal heavy, a preference thing). But how easy is it to get digital cable boxes integrated and working? I have digital cable and getting that working is a big thing for me.

I think I've got everything in Feisty where it needs to be but I just have to bum the coax to test if it works tonight. Otherwise, I'll have to try to figure it out. There's the guide on adding the DCT700 remote but it looks like I'll have to use the Comcast remote and I'd rather use the MCE remote that came with the Hauppauge card (thinking beyond Comcast).

Re:MythTV Related Question

[russ1337]

I have digital cable and getting that working is a big thing for me.

If you're only using the unecrypted digital cable, the HD-5000 might suit your needs. Its supported by the Kernel (i.e no drivers / compiling), but will only receive unencrypted QAM from your cable provider.

If you're using Digital Cable with encrypted content (i.e a premium package), you'll obviously need to retain your cable box (and receive the video into your mythtv with a PVR-150 or similar), and can control your cable box by various means - IR Blaster, Firewire, Serial cable etc.. Search the mythtv forums to see which is easiest and best.

The MCE remote works well under LIRC, and is easy to setup.

Re:MythTV Related Question

[dyslexicbunny]

I've got the MCE remote running already. Here's my desired setup: Cable -> DCT700 -> PVR500

I know I'll need a second box for the other tuner and that's fine. I'll have to figure out how to get another script working with the second IR port on the receiver instead of the first.Newegg picture for reference.

The script in the link I provided has a lircd.conf for the Comcast remote instead of the MCE remote .conf I'm using. The channel change script is a little more involved than what I need it for since we also have an HD box that we can use for most Comcast needs (on-demand, etc) and the script looks to be heavily tied into the Comcast remote. I went with the script here for the channel change. I then changed the words one, two, ... to 1, 2, ... That is what I hope will work. I'll try it out tonight.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[BZWingZero]

In all likelyhood you shouldn't need to. Accounts and directory structure will carry over with the dist update. You may need to redo the video drivers and reconfigure the screen resolution. Before upgrading back up your xorg.conf. Gutsy does have much better GUI-based tools for configuring screen resolution than any of it's predecessors. Upgrade when update manager tells you there is a new distro available instead of downloading the disk and doing a clean install. It will make transferring everything like the accounts easier.

Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.

I think it's weird that all the different apps, especially OS supporting apps, that are upgraded in the new release aren't demanding to be upgraded, even retaining the previous OS version without upgrading it, if dependencies allow (which is usually mostly the case for most apps that don't depend on a new kernel or something).

The Ubuntu upgrade system should offer steady upgrades between milestone OS releases, as it does, but much steadier. The OS release date should be more a convenient watermark, a snapshot with more through testing that developers use as a target, rather than an exclusive release that leaves users of previous OS version behind.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[speaker of the truth]

Could it be waiting a few days until its servers aren't quite so heavy with people downloading the ISO?

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[QuantumRiff]

I believe the command is "sudo update-manager -d" The -d will look to update the distro, and give you the button.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[BlackPignouf]

If you want gutsy apps in feisty, use backports repos.

If you want to update feisty->gutsy, click on the update manager (the orange star on the top right corner),
and then:

click on "New distribution release 7.10 is available ||Upgrade||"

What was your problem exactly?

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

(sudo update-manager -c) works, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the upgrade-manager telling me that its monitoring has found a distro upgrade.

If users don't read Slashdot, how are they supposed to know to look for a new version, to run the command? That's what the u-m icon is for.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[DaveWick79]

You mean the GUI doesn't have this option?

Sounds like the GUI still needs some work...

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

My vmware image showed a popup baloon telling me that Gusty was released and that I could upgrade to it.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[lixee]

My feisty's update manager shows that there's a new distro release and it provides a button to "upgrade" and it's upgrading as I type this.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Chandon Seldon]

I believe the command is "sudo update-manager -d" The -d will look to update the distro, and give you the button.

Not true.

The -d flag gives you the latest development release - which will be newly unstable 8.04 any minute now. You may be able to cheat with the -d flag (and get 7.10) for a couple more hours, but in general update manager will automatically show a new distro version when it's ready - probably tomorrow.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

The problem, exactly, is exactly as I said. The u-m Desktop icon doesn't indicate that there's a distro upgrade available. So I have to know somehow that there's an upgrade available, and then manually start the u-m. That's the entire point of having the u-m icon appear when upgrades are ready.

And the other problem is, as I said, that lots of those "Gutsy" apps aren't necessarily Gutsy, they're just packaged that way. Many don't depend on anything that isn't in Feisty, though there are some complex dependencies on packages that are upgraded to meet the Gutsy deadline. Towards the Gutsy release date, but still in advance of the full Gutsy release, those less dependent apps should start offering to upgrade. Which would in turn take a lot of the load off the upgrade process on the date the full distro upgrade is released.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

There are simple upgrade instructions for upgrading using adept on the ubuntu website. Also on the Kubuntu 7.10 release notes

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.

Having the update-notifier icon show up at every login to tell about a new dist-upgrade would be pretty annoying to those people like me that don't intend to upgrade until the next LTS release. The only time the update-notifier icon should show up is when there are security updates available as it does now. It's easy enough for the user to hit the upgrade button when he runs update-manager manually.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

Did your Desktop automatically show you an upgrade icon without you running an app to find out whether one's available, or did you know it was available and launch u-m? Because I'm complaining about the notifier.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Ornedan]

A random guess would be that you don't have the updated package files yet. It could be that the mirror you're using hasn't been updated yet. Or it could be currently in the form of a molten puddle of metal on the floor.
There might be a real problem somewhere if it's still not offering distro version upgrade after a day or two.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

A tiny fraction of users skip distro upgrades. In fact, the biannual upgrades are one of the primary reasons for Ubuntu's huge popularity. Many times more of us would like to see the icon when there's a distro upgrade. The vast majority of us would have to manually monitor arbitrary reports of the release, and manually run u-m checking if it's available all through the projected release date, until it worked. That's an insane sacrifice of most people's time in exchange for avoiding a minor annoyance by a tiny minority.

If you want to wait, the icon could have a preference to wait for either the next upgrade, or a specified one.

It's impossible for users to know we should run u-m manually when a new distro is out, the part of the process that's far from "easy enough".

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[debile]

I got the update thing in the update manager but can I just download the new iso, boot from the CD and upgrade from there? I'm using the alternate desktop edition because of my software raid. Tried the update button but it's almost impossible to get some bandwidth... however by bittorrent, it goes really fast! Thank's guys

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[twoboxen]

Ok, first of all... starting your post with "How come" immediately makes you look like an idiot.

Secondly, every 6 months is more predictable and often than either Apple or Microsoft supply--take your complaints elsewhere.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

It's impossible for users to know we should run u-m manually when a new distro is out, the part of the process that's far from "easy enough".

Really? It's impossible? Are you kidding?! You mean its impossible to click System-->Update-Manager-->enter password-->click the upgrade button.? Gosh, if its that hard to know when an upgrade to the distribution is available, then how do reconcile your assertion that only a tiny fraction of users actually skip distro upgrades? How did the vast majority of users that don't skip distro upgrade ever find out when a new version was available? According to you, it would be impossible for them to know because isn't a stupid little icon to tell them. You don't think much of your fellow Ubuntu users, do you?

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Insightfill]

How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.

Says here that the update frequency for the notification is once per day; perhaps it hasn't hit that automatic checkpoint yet? As a sibling post said, wait until later today or tomorrow and it will show up. My jump from 6.10 to 7.04 showed up automatically six months ago.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[slack_prad]

It doesn't at the same time for everyone.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

Where are the instructions for knowing the upgrade is available when the "upgrade notifer" icon doesn't appear to tell the user?

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It doesn't include distribution upgrades automatically, but that command will get you what you're after.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

That's not my problem (which is that the u-m isn't notifying me of the available distro upgrade), but it does point at another shortcoming of the system. Why doesn't APT include a BitTorrent protocol interface that upgrades can try, other than just the HTTP and FTP protocols? The torrents are already part of the upgrade process, at least for distros and downloadable discs. Why not include their protocol, now that the content for the protocol and the virtual network of connectible nodes is widely operational?

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

First of all, "how come" is a perfectly good question to ask. Unless the person reading it is an uptight fanboy.

Secondly, your attempt to bash Apple and Microsoft irrelevantly while dismissing my perfectly legitimate question (about an obvious design flaw in Ubuntu) is proof that you are that uptight fanboy.

Take your obnoxious idiocy elsewhere. The millions of us who also would like the update-manager to work properly don't care what you type. We just want to use Ubuntu without wasting a lot of time working for it, rather than it working for us.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

You're a jerkoff, Anonymous Coward. If it were truly "impossible", then running the u-m manually like I said wouldn't work, though I said it did.

The point of the notification icon is that the system's ready state is pushed to the user for activation, rather than the user wasting all that time polling it with the menu access to u-m all the time until it's hit.

The vast majority of users just find out through some other means than a notification icon, like this Slashdot story or the onerous polling process. By which time there is an upgrade available, if they heard about it, but not as soon as it's available, so they're working with the unimproved version longer than they have to.

You really have no basis for conceited condescension when you can't even figure out what the notification icon is for. It's so basic. There's certainly one "fellow" Ubuntu user of whom I don't think much: you. And now I'm going to turn that into not thinking of you at all.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until tomorrow and it will.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a release candidate, not an official release "milestone."

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[lahvak]

How come my Feisty (Ubuntu v7.04) update-manager doesn't know that there's a new distro upgrade available? There should be an icon in my Desktop panel offering a 1-click upgrade if I want.

Go to System->Administration->Update Manager

It will know about the upgrade, and have a button to upgrade. So it's 3 clicks rather than 1 click. I think that's good, because upgrading the whole distro is a major administrative task, you may want to make sure that applications you compiled yourself/installed from other sources will still work, they may need to be recompiled/reinstalled, if you have unusual hardware that gave you trouble with ubuntu before, you may want to back up your system fist, etc. Lot of people prefer to wait a while and keep the old distro until they are sure that nothing will go wrong, and they will find an upgrade message popping up every time they log on annoying. Besides, a one click upgrade path would be pretty much useless at this moment anyway, it seems that plenty of people manage to find the button in the Update manager already :)

As far the second part of your comment, i am not sure I really understand what you are asking about, but it seems to me that using debian unstable distribution would do what you want, if you are willing to live with a broken system every once a while. I don't know enough about ubuntu, but they may have something similar.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Doc Ruby]

If I launch the update-manager manually, it knows the distro upgrade is available, and offers it to me. But it's not showing the icon on the Desktop to notify me to launch u-m. This looks like a design flaw in u-m.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

If it were truly "impossible", then running the u-m manually like I said wouldn't work, though I said it did.

Idiot, you first used the word "impossible". If you are going post hyperbole, then don't be surprised if you get slapped down for it.

The point of the notification icon is that the system's ready state is pushed to the user for activation, rather than the user wasting all that time polling it with the menu access to u-m all the time until it's hit.

As I previously pointed out, the vast majority of users don't need a stupid little icon to know when there is distro upgrade available. They've never had it before, and there's never been any call for it. It's not even listed as a wishlist item on Ubuntu's bugtracking system. You'd think at least one person would file a bug report to help end the suffering of users having to spend around 25 seconds a day, or a week, or a month to manually check for a dist-upgrade wouldn't you? But no. Somehow over, what, 6 different releases no one has bothered to file such a report. Perhaps you should file one, and then watch as its status gets rated as "Invalid" because of the non-existent demand for the developers to go to the trouble of changing the behavior of the update-notifier. Users should only be bothered by the system when the system needs their attention. That's basic HIG.

The vast majority of users just find out through some other means than a notification icon, like this Slashdot story or the onerous polling process.

Onerous? There you go with the hyperbole again.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

It's enough to ask the question once, rather than repeating it a half dozen times, even after it has already been answered.

Update Manager, unless you changed the setting, updates once a day. So, sometime in the 24 hours after the mirror you use gets updated, you will get a pop up asking if you want to upgrade to the newest version of Ubuntu. After that, its one click, entering your password, waiting an hour or two for it to download and configure, and then a reboot.

Have some patience, it'll make you sound less like an indignant child.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[Anonymous Coward]

Did your Desktop automatically show you an upgrade icon without you running an app to find out whether one's available, Yes, it just did.

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[compro01]

it's not built in (yet), but there is such a thing available.

http://sianka.free.fr/?lang=en

Re:Feisty Doesn't Know

[lixee]

I didn't upgrade any packages in a while, so the notifier's been sitting there for some time now. I clicked on it because I heard of the release of Gutsy. I get your point though.

Seamless on IBM T41

[helixcode123]

I installed the release candidate last week on the family T41 laptop. Everything "Just Worked" including sound and wifi. I'm actually thinking of starting to recommend Ubuntu (instead of MAC) to some of my acquaintences that ask my opinion on what to get for their new computer. That said, I'll likely wait for the next LTS (Long Term Support) version due out this spring before upgrading my work laptop though.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Tteddo]

Actually the real update command is gksu update-manager --dist-upgrade

Re:yawn......

[someone1234]

The strength of linux is diversity. Ubuntu happens to be a desktop oriented OS, you don't need a desktop oriented OS. So, move along.

will it wipe my /home?

[ch0ad]

i have /home on a separate partition... will it wipe my home dir or not if i make a new user with the same name as my current user?

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[BlowHole666]

Don't know but i may wipe your butt :)

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[speaker of the truth]

I'd recommend backing it up regardless of what people say. I've never heard someone complain about having a backup they didn't need, yet I've often heard people complain about not having a backup they needed.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[ch0ad]

back up on to *what*!? my home dir is about 60 gigs! maybe i'll rename it to be safe, then it won't have any excuse to wipe it. i can copy all the files later and chown them

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[Constantine XVI]

If you upgrade in-place, it shouldn't touch your partitions at all.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[tomstdenis]

Back it up to something with at least 60G of usable space? An 80G drive is only 64$ CAD or so. If the data is that important you'll just buy a USB enclosure, 80G drive and copy it overnight.

Tom

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[ElleyKitten]

i have /home on a separate partition... will it wipe my home dir or not if i make a new user with the same name as my current user? If you do a clean install, you can tell it not with the /home dir, just watch what options you select during install. If you upgrade, it should leave your /home as it is. You should make a backup just in case, but you shouldn't have any problems.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[Fallingcow]

If you mean an update from Feisty to Gutsy, it doesn't touch /home (except for some conf files scattered around in there, I'm sure).

If you mean a fresh install over some other distro... well, I usually just create "guest" as my account when doing things that way. I figure I may want the account at some point, and if not then it's no big deal. Create that, log in, create my main account (DOES NOT overwrite existing /home/user folder when done through the GUI in Ubuntu), chown the folder to the new user, log out, log in under the new account with all my stuff there, disable all admin abilities for "guest".

Sounds like a lot of work, but it really takes about a minute, and that way I'm never surprised by quirky installers. WAY quicker than backing up (though backing up is still safer)

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[ch0ad]

ah but i am impatient! i want it NOW :p

i think i'll make a new user account now and fill it with one or 2 random files. then i can install 7.10 and add a user of the same name as the new one. then at least i can report back and say if it wiped the files or not.

i am confident enough it wont wipe a user account that i'm not installing over top of :)

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[jefu]

Upgrade should not touch your /home. If you do a new install (I had to with the release candidate version a week or two back because I didn't have enough free space on /), you'll need to pick the manual partitioning method - but it is all pretty much point and click.

The RC was the easiest Unix (not just linux) install I've ever done (and I've been doing Unix installs for mumblety-mumblety years now) with the possible exception of a MacOS X install. The worst part was waiting for everything to load so I could check it on reboot (having done installs where after an hour or so of loading resulted in an unbootable machine and a retry or two or three). Restricted drivers (for NVidia and Broadcom wireless) were trivial.

I did have some troubles loading in updates after the fact (loading the million or so oddball packages I had installed previously), but these were not likely to be of concern to most users (for example loading "ocaml-core" failed).

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[Anonymous Coward]

use the dist-upgrade option.

this isnt windows where you need to install the OS all over again for the upgrade.

ad if you must use a cd/dvd, get the "alternate" package.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[SwedishPenguin]

If you do a complete install, just be sure to pick manual partitioning and you should be fine. Just be sure not to mark the option to format your home partition ;)

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[ch0ad]

ok thanks for the replies people :) i will hold y'all personally responsible if it goes pear shaped

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[russ1337]

back up on to *what*!? my home dir is about 60 gigs! maybe i'll rename it to be safe, then it won't have any excuse to wipe it. i can copy all the files later and chown them

If you have 60GB of data that you're not backing up... you have bigger problems than worrying if the upgrade will overwrite it.

Do as the reply above mentions and buy an external drive caddy for less than $25, and a 120GB drive for less than $50

Total cost = less than $1 per GB.

Oh and encrypt your backup and store it in your drawer at work.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[Corporate Troll]

Mod up.... An OS installation is *always* a risky business, regardless what other n00bs may tell.. An external USB harddisk isn't expensive, and alternatively, backup important data to a network server. Heck, do both... That's even better.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[jargoone]

How about onto a separate LVM LV? Oh wait, you'd have to get the alternate install disc for that. That's one of my biggest pet peeves with Ubuntu. LVM is pretty much essential these days, and you have to jump through hoops t get to it.

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[verbatim_verbose]

Given your username, it appears that yours might need a wipe too!

Re:will it wipe my /home?

[Anonymous Coward]

The upgrade to 7.0 formatted my /home partition. During install I used manual partitioning, told it to use that partition for home, but not format. It formatted anyway.

Fortunately, that was a pretty experimental box, so no personal data lost but it was pretty annoying.

Damn!

[Chris_Jefferson]

Damn, and I've only just finished compiling the last... wait. Wrong distro. Sorry.

Re:Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

just finished compiling the last... wait

Well, since you're the last user to finish compiling wait, I suppose you don't have much use for wait then, do you?

So what's next?

[julesh]

Huffy Hummingbird?
Hapless Hookworm?

Re:So what's next?

[LuckyStarr]

Hardy Heron.

Re:So what's next?

[zocle]

"Hardy Heron" - http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1099

Re:So what's next?

[Joeyray]

Hardy Heron

Re:So what's next?

[donscarletti]

Hardy Heron I believe. Sadly it's so intuitive to shorten it to "hardon" that people probably will.

Re:So what's next?

[adyroman]

Horny Hard-on.

Re:So what's next?

[Beat The Odds]

Huffy Hummingbird? Hapless Hookworm?

Humping Horneytoad

Re:So what's next?

[mashade]

Check the list ;) or add your own...
Ubuntu Names Repository

Re:So what's next?

[iTowelie]

Hungry Hippo. No wait, that is a Vista install. Sorry, wrong OS.

Re:So what's next?

[scubamage]

-Vermicious Vole -Wonderful Wildebeast -Excellent Echidna -Gnarley Gnoll -Super Serpent

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPO!

that or horny hippo. which may not stomp on copyrights. ...my captcha is also "incest".

wait what.

Re:So what's next?

[owlstead]

No, Vista is called Vista, or if you insist, you may call it by its development name.

Longborn.

Re:So what's next?

[Jugalator]

I'm sad they didn't go for Horny Hare. :-(

Their chance to use the Horny adjective will only come once...

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean Hardy Heroin?

Uh, OK. I guess they are based out of South Africa and all but damn, with the "war on drugs" you would think they would be more diplomatic.

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which of course everybody is going to refer to as Hairy Hard-on.

Re:So what's next?

[Nimey]

Hairy Hardon.

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Horny Hare!

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but they still have the option of using Impotent Iguana!

Re:So what's next?

[rumith]

Hungry Hydralisk

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't we sniffy today!

Re:So what's next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Hardon Harry

Re:So what's next?

[TeacherOfHeroes]

Hungry Hippo

Ubuntu or OpenSuse?

[adnonsense]

On my main PC (development / surfstation) I'm currently running Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) which I'm quite happy with, but for various reasons I'm planning to wipe it and install a new distro from scratch. I've been waiting for this Ubuntu release before I make my move, but just recently OpenSuse 10.3 came out and I'm hearing good things of it too. Has anyone tried both and got an opinion?

I'm looking for a distro which will give me a good environment for development in (mainly databases and script languages) while making the "desktop" side of things not too much of a hassle. The development aspect is pretty much distro-agnostic for me (as long as there's a reasonably recent gcc etc. I'm happy); it's more the "user experience" I'm concerned about, because I don't want to spend too much time messing about under the hood getting browser plugins, mp3 codecs etc. etc. working.

Re:Ubuntu or OpenSuse?

[JonJ]

Yeah, I've tried both. OpenSUSE refused to add update servers, refused to work with my wireless card, and would randomly crash firefox. Whereas both the Fedora 8 Test 3 and Gutsy beta would actually be quite stable compared to the released version of OpenSUSE 10.3.

Re:Ubuntu or OpenSuse?

[Vskye]

I just recently installed openSUSE this week. (previously had Kubuntu Feisty installed) My results so far are that the install went good, even though Yast has improved it still doesn't hold a candle compared to apt. (software updates) I'm having some sound and program issues also, that I never had with Kubuntu. (still looking into this though, since it's so damn random) Could be related to the Nvidia drivers. Overall system speed is slower also. I'll more than likely just end up installing Gutsy.

Re:Ubuntu or OpenSuse?

[the eric conspiracy]

I recently converted to Ubuntu Feisty because a SuSE update left my laptop wireless unusable. My main complaint with SuSE has always been the package management system. In the past it was teh sux0r, but maybe now it is only moderately crappy. I also found the desktop much less responsive. Also there always seemed to be more prepackaged stuff for Ubuntu than SuSE. And ACPI on Ubuntu was way way better than SuSE.

In SuSE's favor multimedia worked better than in Feisty - I hope Gutsy improves on that situation.

release notes

[balster neb]

Unfortunately the summary doesn't link to a good list of features.

The release notes for the beta version give a good overview of what you can expect:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/gutsybeta

With 3D desktop effects and NTFS write support enabled by default, and fast user switching and improved X configuration, this is one of the most significant Ubuntu releases in a while.

Re:release notes

[r3b00tm0nk3y]

"... this is one of the most significant Ubuntu releases in a while."

Significant and Ubuntu release, shouldn't be used in the same sentence, until they get off the six month treadmill. Until then there's only "works for me" latest release and the older YMMV releases.

In one month any bugs in Gutsy are for the ages and !hoary becomes the new golden child.

Re:release notes

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not know about the LTS releases, which are supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server. If you've ever looked at the forums (ubuntuforums.org), you'll see that a LOT of people are still using 6.06 LTS and a lot of the step-by-step guides are written for it. Also, you can buy support contracts from Canonical for the LTS releases.

If the LTS release is still too buggy for you, why don't you check out the stable branch of Debian (the distro Ubuntu is based on)?

Seems very newbie friendly

[Jugalator]

We've just tried this one out as soon as it was released, and there was quite some differences in installation on our modern laptop hardware compared to 7.04 at least. Proprietary graphics driver installation couldn't really be much easier from what I can see -- besides by making it automatic, but I suppose there are reasons other than technological ones behind that.

After the few guided clicks to get that done, a reboot later and suddenly Compiz was also activated without any user actions needed. Hmm, so how do you configure those 3D effects then? No way we could find, but from reading an online computer magazine, we found out that the Compiz Config Settings Manager wasn't included. We installed that one, and it then integrated nicely into the Desktop Settings as a new "Custom effects" option. Why that one wasn't part of the distro by default is still unknown to us though. It seemed like an obvious choice to let the user customize the window effects?

Otherwise, I think Compiz didn't lag or anything even once when maximizing windows or rotating the desktop, etc, and this was on a laptop without a *that* hot graphics card. So we were impressed about how smooth the UI was. No interruptions from some service suddenly kicking in to work a bit like every user of Vista has no doubt grown used to take for granted by now with the SuperFetch, System Restore, Search Indexer etc services. They seem to kick in at the most inappropriate times -- not even when the computer is idle! Come on! Maybe Ubuntu's new desktop search indexer make it suffer too, but nothing we could see anyway.

After doing this, we unplugged the network card, and voila, it automatically discovered our WLAN. We didn't have to do anything, really.

So let's try open the (already mounted and ready) NTFS drive with Windows Vista on it? Oh, we can simply drag a file there now too -- cool! NTFS-3g apparently installed and ready.

We seemed to have to install Windows Media Audio support though and as we're still quite some Linux amateurs, we have still not got around that part as the work day is over. It's been fun experimenting though, and getting up to date with what a modern "desktop Linux" distro can offer. Looking at the feature list of Ubuntu 7.10, and summing that one up with the new features of GNOME 2.20 gives one a mighty impressive list of new features compared to just 6 months ago.

Linux desktop development (GNOME, KDE, desktop distros, ...) really seem to be picking up some pace lately. And we're just months away from KDE 4. This is exciting times to follow for sure, and for the first time I'm starting to become a believer in "Linux on the desktop".

I have some pretty high demands of novice usability though, which makes me hesitate still as for some distros. E.g. SUSE Linux 10.3 had a few quirks on my home stationary computer. Its NVIDIA driver install having me to use the command prompt and special "SUSE for NVIDIA" instructions is unacceptable for amateur usage IMHO, although I finally got it done. It also even failed to install the distro to the hard drive the first time around, because it couldn't mount the SATA drive it had just formatted (??). A reboot, and then it could do it like it was no problem at all. *shrug* That also gave an early feeling of "still aimed for geeks" that I'd so much like it to see it move away from.

But back to Ubuntu 7.10 -- so far no problems here, and I was left with an excitement to play with it more after the day. :-)

Re:Seems very newbie friendly

[MeditationSensation]

What's this "we" shit? You mix "I" and "we" in your post. Are you schizo?

Re:yawn......

[Anonymous Coward]

sadly, the diversity of linux, it's ridiculous nerd names and the lack of standardization ensure that linux distros remain the in the realm of hobbyist.

Feist + Eye Candy

[Apreche]

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now. I think I can safely say that from a user perspective there aren't any major difference between Feisty and Gutsy besides the eye candy. Despite this, I am seriously loving the fact that people are going nuts over how awesome Gutsy is when those same people were meh about Feisty and Linux in general. It just shows that all these people who have been putting down Linux because of its lack of hardware compatability, etc. really just wanted eye candy this whole time. Meanwhile, the real problems with desktop Linux, that they would use as ammo for hate, are as present as ever.

Re:Feist + Eye Candy

[Jugalator]

. I think I can safely say that from a user perspective there aren't any major difference between Feisty and Gutsy besides the eye candy. We had a better install experience with 7.10 thanks to improved driver support.

Other than that, I'd rate things like NTFS-3g by default and everything that comes with GNOME 2.20 taken together as pretty major. Yes, neither of these are custom coded stuff for Ubuntu, but it will do a big difference to many novice users jumping on the train. And the Ubuntu stuff isn't too bad either, with new printer autoconfiguration, desktop searching, etc. And yes, these are very much from a user perspective.

Re:Feist + Eye Candy

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of at least one substantive change. The RA2500 wifi now works! It wouldn't before, and if having Ubuntu without internet is pretty much like having a brick.

Re:Feist + Eye Candy

[Archangel Michael]

Feist is Eye Candy in that nifty video used by Apple and the iPod ..... oh wait, never mind ...

A link for those that don't get the joke ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Feist

Re:Feist + Eye Candy

[Constantine XVI]

Well, for one, printer installation is 100% automatic (plug in printer, wait for "Ready to use" bubble). Second, Tracker search (faster and much less resource-heavy compared to Beagle due to lack of Mono dependency). Then you have the integrated Appearance app, the user switcher in the panel, a new wallpaper (It's better than Vista already! :) and a general tightening-up of the system.

Re:Feist + Eye Candy

[InlawBiker]

Compiz is eye candy, but on Feisty I had to: * Install printer drivers - it was a pain. * Futz around with the wireless network drivers, also a pain. * Get multiple monitors working. Any time you have to edit xorg.conf it's a bad day, especially for newbies. * Spend a lot of time trying to get Beryl working. * Get NTFS working - it was really easy, but still had to be done. Gutsy is supposed to address all of the above. It looks like they fixed all the right stuff.

Coming soon:

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming Soon: Ubuntu 8.04 Horny Hippo.

Have they made it any easier yet to encrypt your

[mbrod]

hard drive from the get go?

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Constantine XVI]

Yes. I upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy Tribe (alpha) 5 and it was near-flawless. I assume going straight to the final version works as well.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[BZWingZero]

"gksu update-manager -d" works as well.

Live CD works but no Compiz

[coolsva]

Tried this latest release, mainly to check the Compiz window manager. Unfortunately, the live cd does not permit visual options other than the basic. Still does not detect my video card (although did set the correct resolution). Plus, mplayer is not in the default, can only get kmplayer if I want (bummer, I have gnome not KDE) All in all, improved since 7.04 but nothing to write home about

Re:Live CD works but no Compiz

[Constantine XVI]

Applications -> Add/Remove, search for MPlayer and it should be #1 on the list.

Re:Live CD works but no Compiz

[Cryophallion]

In order for it to install the restricted drivers (which is probably required for your card), you have to install. The livecd is not persistent, and the comp has to be rebooted for the drivers to be updated and included in xorg.

Once I installed, and installed the restricted drivers, everything worked like a charm.

Re:Live CD works but no Compiz

[olddoc]

Kubuntu is ubuntu with KDE. It's what I use.

5.0Gbps in the past 5 minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just an update to show how the demand on the torrents is changing over time...

In the last 5 minutes, the total downstream bandwidth in use by all Ubuntu torrents is 5.0Gbps.

The last 30 minute average is 5.5Gbps and the average for the first 5 minutes of this 30 minute sampling period was 7.2Gbps. The 15 minute average is 4.9Gbps which shows that the demand for bandwidth has steadied for now.

Re:5.0Gbps in the past 5 minutes

[Gazzonyx]

Another Tracker, just in case: LinuxTracker :: Details for torrent "Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) - Desktop CD i386"

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Fallingcow]

Please bear with me -- I'm still on the Ubuntu learning curve... If I do as you suggest there, will that upgrade my "Feisty" to "Gutsy Gibbon" without losing my files, accounts, directory structure, etc? Will I need to reinstall video drivers and reconfigure my screen resolution settings again? (The latter was a real headache the first time around...) I can't find a straight-forward answer anywhere.

OK, you know how you are prompted to install updates from time to time, right? Usually for security or bug fixes or whatever?

This is essentially the same thing, except you're installing newer versions of packages rather than just ones with fixes applied to them. You won't need to edit or format partitions or anything like that. It's just another package update, really, but a BIG one that will take a long time, and which will occasionally ask you "do you want to replace such-and-such configuration file, which appears to have been altered, with the new one", and unless you recognize the file you'll just want to say "yes, I want the new one" to all of those.

Video drivers: not sure, but Gutsy prompts you to install restricted drivers with a little icon up by the clock (in Gnome, don't know about KDE). So, if the upgrade breaks your restricted video drivers (I suspect that it will, as I doubt that the Ubuntu folks feel comfortable including non-free drivers in a mostly-automated major update) then it should just prompt you to re-install them the first time you log in, after a reboot.

As for the resolution thing: if you manually edited any files (probably /etc/X11/xorg.conf, if you did) then you may want to make a backup copy of them (probably easiest from the command line, since you'll likely need superuser access. Use the cp command to make the copy; for example, to make a backup of xorg.conf: sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup ) before you upgrade, then go ahead and say YES to let the upgrade overwrite the configuration file when it prompts (assuming that it does), as you can always try out your backed up one if the new one screws things up. Consider asking for help on the Ubuntu forums or on an Ubuntu IRC channel (if you are familiar with IRC) before restoring the file, just in case.

If you did not manually edit a configuration file to get your resolution how you want it, then my advice is to either stick with what you have, or just give Gutsy a go and take the risk. It might mess it up, it might not. Probably not, in fact, but it's possible. In any case, the forums and IRC support will still be there if you need them, and should be able to help you get things back in order should the upgrade cause any breakage of any kind.

Ubuntu meaning?

[threaded]

Isn't "Ubuntu" an ancient word meaning "Can't install Gentoo"?

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. GTFO, troll.

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[nagora]

Isn't "Ubuntu" an ancient word meaning "Can't install Gentoo"?

Well, ironically, I've got a laptop here that has Gentoo on it (WiFi working fine) but I have yet to find a machine (out of at least 5 over several years) on which Ubuntu would install and work. I'm dowloading GG now in the hope of getting a machine my mother can use but so far "Ubuntu" has meant "Can't install at all" to me.

TWW

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually no, it means "he who is not a pompous elitist".

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[level_headed_midwest]

Ubuntu and Gentoo are very different distributions aimed at different segments. Gentoo's strengths are that it's very customizable (down to the compile option level) and the suite of CLI tools is excellent. However, the system demands of GCC to compile the OS and software are pretty steep, especially on older hardware. I used to run Gentoo on a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4-M laptop and the computer spent at least 20% of its time compiling stuff. That's fine if you have a desktop and can leave it on 24/7 and it's well-cooled, but a hot, slow, laptop that has to be carried place to place and sometimes run on battery is a much bigger pain. Sure, I'd rather run Gentoo on my new laptop (12" unit with a C2D U7500 @ 1.067 GHz and an 80 GB HDD) but a binary distro like Ubuntu or SUSE is much easier on the hardware. Yes, I know you can use a bunch of binary packages on Gentoo but it's suboptimal compared to a binary distro and far inferior to actually compiling stuff yourself.

Bottom line is that there is no one tool that's perfect for all jobs, but there are multiple tools- that's what makes Linux and the other *nixes great. Otherwise we'd have "you get what Lord Steve thinks you should have" OS X and Windows. Windows does have several versions, but they only vary in the amount of stuff that's intentionally crippled rather than in a meaningful way like Ubuntu and Gentoo differ.

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[shutdown -p now]

Indeed, and that is a well-known fact. What's less known is that "Gentoo", in turn, is an even more ancient word for "can't install Slackware".

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[nagora]

Just as an update: Gutsy Gibbon downloaded, runs from the CD fine on the laptop and (with the addition of a firmware file) can run my WiFi. But it won't install. It thinks the 80GB Toshiba 8025GA ATA disc is a sata drive and throws up everytime it tries to access it.

I've lost track of how many versions of Ubuntu don't work for me now.

TWW

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[Dan Ost]

As an ex-Slackware user who is currently extremely happy with Gentoo, I find amusing that you seem to be implying that a Slackware install is more complicated than a Gentoo install. Neither is difficult, but the Slackware install is far less involved.

Assuming a LiveCD won't suffice, I still use Slackware whenever I need to get a machine up and running in less than an hour (Gentoo installs take me about an hour).

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't "Gentoo" an ancient word meaning "Can't install FreeBSD"?

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[drachenstern]

What does your system do if you throw gparted at it? Have you tried creating the requisite reiser/ext3 and swap part for your install yet, or are you counting on the installer to do that for you?

Are you using the live cd to install or the alternate install cd? (presumably you're trying to install from the graphical portion of the live cd?

What is the base comp? Which BIOS (AWARD/AMI/PHOENIX/etc)? Is this a laptop? Have you tried a different hard drive than the one that it keeps puking over?

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[nagora]

What does your system do if you throw gparted at it? Have you tried creating the requisite reiser/ext3 and swap part for your install yet, or are you counting on the installer to do that for you?

It seems that this was the problem: I HAD created the partitions (in fact I was overwriting a test Gentoo system which was working perfectly on the laptop). I then had selected manual partitioning to try to format those partitions and that's where it started throwing up. I also could not mount the partitions from the console.

However, I had one more go this morning and just tried the automatic partitioning and it seems to have worked.

Wireless is also working now but not automatically, and the laptop can't detect any Samba shares even though I can browse them from Konq by using the smb://user@machine URL format.

Overall it seems okay, but really I think I'm happier with Gentoo and Windowmaker. My mother certainly won't be able to cope with getting the wireless to work after each reboot (it seems to have slight variances in what the problem is which is stopping me using a script, at least at the moment).

I'd also like to see at least a minimal firewall on as standard, of the "-m state --state=NEW -J=DROP" type. I understand the argument as to why it's not on, I just don't agree with it.

But at least it's running!

TWW

Re:Ubuntu meaning?

[drachenstern]

Yeah, my laptop on 7.04 routinely pukes over the wireless (broadcom airforce bcm43xx).

Get this, sometimes when the wireless drops, it saturates the PCI bus or something as it prevents my superio from transmitting my kb requests. IE, I have no keyboard when the wireless pukes, but the mouse still works over usb. I still haven't found a solution to that problem, so I'm really hoping the update fixes that

"Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out?

[evilviper]

"Mom, Dad, I've got something to tell you..."

"What is it Gutsy?"

"...I'm tired of living a lie..."

Re:"Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out?

[hhlost]

"... and please call me 7.10. I'm too old for you to be calling me by a stupid, cutesy nickname."

Re:"Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! Now I can't wait to see him grow up to be a Horny Homo within the next six months...

Re:"Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Mr & Mrs. Gibbon have only got themselves to blame - calling their son Gutsy, ffs!

That's got to be the gayest name ever (until 6 months from now, no doubt).

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[mrjb]

I already have all I need from XP, Ubuntu has a loOOoooooooong way to go to even reach that humble benchmark
You forgot to describe what that 'humble benchmark' is, but in any case it depends on what your needs are. What do you feel is lacking?

You may need Photoshop, DRM or games, so you use XP.

I need 100% legal software on a low budget; a rock solid, cross-platform programming environment; audio routing across almost any 2 audio applications. I don't want to wait for minutes and minutes when searching for a file- I want it NOW. XP just doesn't cut it for me.

Interesting enough, more and more software that started out as Open Source software for Linux only is becoming available for XP. Do you use Firefox? Thunderbird? Gaim? Gimp? Audacity? Open office? Free software is becoming an increasingly realistic alternative to closed software.

If you like that philosophy, you may want to order in a free live CD and take it for a spin. It won't cost you anything- you won't even have to install anything.

Re:Have they made it any easier yet to encrypt you

[Eletido]

If you download the alternate installer, you can encrypt the hard drive in the install process. I haven't done this myself, only heard about it.

Works great on my new laptop!

[FooBarWidget]

My new Dell laptop (Inspiron 6400) arrived just today. The perfect chance to install the latest Ubuntu.

I'm very impressed. Wireless networking worked out-of-the-box. Battery support works out-of-the-box (if I remove the power cable, Ubuntu will switch to power saving mode just like Vista would; battery meter is shown by default). I can plug and unplug USB mouses at will. Partitioning the system is painless because it supports non-destructive NTFS resizing out-of-the-box. I have absolutely no idea why so many people are complaining about Linux laptop support.

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[theantipop]

I have absolutely no idea why so many people are complaining about Linux laptop support. I try Ubuntu live cds about once every 6 months. While the general feeling that I was fighting against the OS to get an install up has definitely subsided in the last 2 years, there are still issues. As much as you would be like to believe based on personal experience that managing an install of Linux is as easy as Windows in every case, it's still not there yet. My biggest barrier to a full install is my Ati TV Tuner and video card. Simply put, if I ditch Windows I lose a piece of hardware I use daily. I don't own a television so until I do decide to buy one I require Windows to use my tuner. Point is, don't assume everyone has as wonderful a time as you are.

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[grimmy]

You bought that piece of hardware to work with Windows, you can't expect every piece of hardware not meant for linux to work :)

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[SpaghettiPattern]

I remove the power cable, Ubuntu will switch to power saving mode just like Vista would

And very unlike Mac OS. Just bought a Macbook Pro (which is sweet hw-wise) and power management just sucks out of the box. And there's a load of other stuff I'm not happy about. Ubuntu on a Dell suddenly seem to make so much sense :(

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[Anonymous Coward]

USB mouses

Mice, not mouses

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[dankasfuk]

I have absolutely no idea why so many people are complaining about Linux laptop support. 2 Words...suspend & resume

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[FooBarWidget]

Worked fine for me. Although it didn't suspend when I close the laptop lid (I don't know whether it's supposed to; this is my first laptop), the Suspend button on the logout dialog worked fine. Resuming also worked fine. No apps crashed or freaked out. Internet connection restored as it is supposed to.

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[lucas teh geek]

wtf mate? mac os has configurable settings for running off power adaptor and battery that are invoked by plugging and and unplugging the cord. if yours doesn't work I'd be taking it back to have it replaced rather than whining one /. about it

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[FigTree]

While I am in agreement with you it would be nice if OSX let you change the number of used cores when in battery mode.

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[gottebag]

You should give tvtime a try. It doesn't support recording but it works very nicely with my ATI TV Tuner for just watching TV.

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[lucas teh geek]

perhaps its a faulty assumption, but I'd assumed that "minimal power usage" would (amongst other things) be restricting it to one core whilst "performance" would have no such restriction

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[SpaghettiPattern]

wtf mate? mac os has configurable settings for running off power adaptor and battery that are invoked by plugging and and unplugging the cord. if yours doesn't work I'd be taking it back to have it replaced rather than whining one /. about it

Buddy you should get up-to-date before using such language. Do you even own a Macbook Pro?

As you clearly cannot be arsed I'll provide a reference.

Want more?

• On Mac OS, try to have windows getting focus when pointed to but without it being raised. Trivial and dead easy on Ubuntu or any other Linux distro. But on Mac Os you have to buy a 3rd party window manager for this (which will also provide desktops which almost all Linux distros have too.)
• Ever tried developing Perl on a Mac? Ever noticed that the provided version is horribly old and that upgrading is unendlessly times more tedious than on Ubuntu?
• Why oh why does Mac Os have capitalized system directories which are a bitch to type? Just not to break the "System Folder" tradition? And to annoy developers?

And that's just me fidling about the Mac for one morning.

The bright side? The Macbook Pro looks sweet and girls like me for that. (Not so much my personality but the perception of it changed.)

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[lucas teh geek]

for the record i have a macbook (!pro)

it sounds like you bought a mac when you wanted linux based pc. dont worry, it's a common mistake usually made by window users trying linux for the first time too (except expecting it be work like windows instead). if you expect everything to work like %SYSTEM_X you should probably just use $SYSTEM_X and be done with it

point 1: nope, it's not something I've tried
point 2: nope, i dont do perl
point 3: echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc i use this on every *nix machine, makes typing file names on case sensitive file systems less of a pita

re: the hibernate, you're right, there's nothing in the gui put the macbook into hibernation. it can be done from the command line (dont use that if you're using encrypted disks, i think you need mode 3 or 5 but im sure you can google for it), personally i feel it's unnecessary and a bit of a throwback from people with experience with other OS's with unreliable or power hunger sleep modes. i'd rather lose 10-20 minutes of battery life every ~24hr slept and have my laptop usable in an instant, than have to wait several minutes for 2gb of data to be read back from the hdd into ram before I can use the thing. there arent many occasions where I'd need my laptop and not have access to a powerpoint for over 3 hours

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[SpaghettiPattern]

Nah, didn't buy a Mac to have a Linux bog. I got a Macook Pro because it's a very decent system. As a bonus you can run Mac Os, Linux and even Windows. As Mac Os is seen as a serious *nix derivate I thought to give it a shot.

point 3: echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc i use this on every *nix machine, makes typing file names on case sensitive file systems less of a pita

You are talking about command line completion. I was talking about point to focus. I.e. I point to a window, it gets input focus and I can write in it without it (and all its brothers) being raised to front. This has been on all X Windows window managers I have ever used. If you want this simple feature on a Mac you have to buy something like VisualDesktop Pro. Why do I have license a US$ 40 utility for something trivial? Is this leaving out of simple stuff there to enable a 3rd party utility suppliers market? I'd rather use good old X on the Mac. Xterm (and derivate terminals) is still the application with a GUI I use most ;)

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[lucas teh geek]

You are talking about command line completion. I was talking about point to focus.

well, actually my point 3 was meant to line up with with your third bullet list item (Why oh why does Mac Os have capitalized system directories which are a bitch to type? Just not to break the "System Folder" tradition? And to annoy developers?) but i typed my reply somewhat out of order

Re:Works great on my new laptop!

[SpaghettiPattern]

well, actually my point 3 was meant to line up with with your third bullet list item

Fair enough. In my enthusiasm I missed this...

Re: Works great on my new laptop!

[Dolda2000]

Although it didn't suspend when I close the laptop lid (I don't know whether it's supposed to; this is my first laptop) Yes, that is the single most stupid thing with gnome-power-manager. It is actually set up by default to not suspend your laptop when you close the lid. Of course, it's easy to fix -- just edit the power manager properties using g-p-m's GUI and set it to suspend when closing the lid -- but I cannot for the life of me understand who would not want to have that as the default setting.

Re: Works great on my new laptop!

[FooBarWidget]

I don't want to. This morning I left my laptop at home, powered on to download a torrent. I want to turn off the monitor to save power, but there is no on-off button for the monitor. So I closed the lid, and the monitor powered off.

In this situation, I wouldn't want it to automatically suspend. In fact, I read a few Slashdot posts in which the authors say that they find it extremely annoying that their MacBook do suspend automatically, preventing them to close their lid temporarily to drink a cup of coffee without breaking Internet connections.

Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[TheMoonRat]

A couple of months ago I partitioned up a chunk of my hard-drive and installed Ubuntu with the full intention of it becoming my primary operating system; pre - orange box the only game I played was known to work via Wine. So I go ahead and install it: but hit a brick wall on 2 things. The first, no matter how much I tried I could not get my monitor refresh rate to 100hz. The nvidia settings would only go upto 85hz, and no amount of xorg.conf editing would work either. So, fair enough I thought; tried to play some music. Ahh, very tiny problem, no Creative X-Fi support at all! No sound = no Linux I'm afraid

Which is incredibly frustrating. The last time I went for a serious attempt to move to Linux I couldn't access the internet because of driver issues with my modem or something similar. It seems every time I give it a go, something new on my machine thwarts my efforts by not working under Linux :(

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[darjen]

I had a pretty similar experience with Ubuntu 6.10 on my asus laptop. I have a 26" benq monitor, and simply could not get my resolution up to the 19x12 that it should be. Also, sound and wifi didn't work out of the box. I was trying the live CD version. I am curious to try 7.10 just to see any improvements, but I'm not expecting much.

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[Isaac-Lew]

So why not build/buy a machine with parts that are known to work with Linux? Or alternatively, replace what doesn't work with Linux in your system with parts that do.

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[xx01dk]

You seem to be in the same boat that I am; I give the latest release a go every so often just to check out the state of things, and then go back to what works specifically for me when it gets too tedious or too frustrating to get a simple thing to work. I used Edgy Eft a lot before slowly returning back to the dark side over the period of a month after trying futilely to get Eve Online to work under Wine, and also the other game I was hot for at the time, BF 2142 wouldn't work at all. So I figured I'd let it go for then. (I understand EO is working on a Linux distro, and that more success has been made with Wine since then.)

You have to admit though, every time a new distro/kernel is released, even if they only get incrementally better, there is progress being made. I'd point at the "upgrade" from WinXP as an example of the alternative *cough cough*. So give it some time, and maybe a few iterations down the road and your card will be supported from the get-go with no compiling needed. And hey you still can't beat the price.

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[TheMoonRat]

That isn't going to attract new users to Linux! Asking them to replace expensive (but well known branded) hardware because it doesn't work. If Linux cost money I wouldn't be trying it. Needing to get new hardware that works for Linux is effectively giving the Operating System a cost.

I know giant strides have been made (and are being made with the recent AMD/ATI announcement); but unfortunately I still seem to have the back luck in the hardware I have

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[theantipop]

Adding to MoonRat's reply, it seems as though a lot of the high-spec A/V hardware isn't compatible with Linux in some way. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder card because I have a Shuttle with limited expandability but high portability. I get 2d support but it is nearly impossible to utilize the tuner card in any way, shape or form. I bought this piece of hardware for a very specific reason. I'm also not blaming anyone, merely adding that it is unfortunate that the number of "fringe" cases of hardware support in Linux is still fairly substantial.

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time you can do this: open a terminal and type the following command:

gtf

Example: gtf 1024 768 100

It should return something like

Modeline "1024x768_100.00" (...)

Copy and paste this line into the "Monitor" section (xorg.conf file). Also change all references from "1024x768" to "1024x768_100.00" in all "Modes" lines ("Screen" section).

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[nick.ian.k]

That isn't going to attract new users to Linux! Asking them to replace expensive (but well known branded) hardware because it doesn't work. If Linux cost money I wouldn't be trying it. Needing to get new hardware that works for Linux is effectively giving the Operating System a cost.

You could legitimately argue that if the developers working on anything related to hardware compatibility issues for Linux chose to build things in a secretive, non-cooperative fashion. But the truth is that it's quite the other way around.

Here are two arguments that would be substantially more accurate than what you're suggesting:

1) Purveyors of mass-marketed products passed invisible extra costs onto consumers by intentionally limiting said products; consumers eat the cost when they become aware of the limitations and recognize the need to replace said products.

2) Consumers of mass marketed products either made uninformed purchases of limited products and were unknowingly responsible for increasing their long-term costs associated.

A much more likely scenario, however, would be as follows:

3) Consumers purchased products and then their needs changed, requiring purchase of similar-yet-different products.

Really, it's like discovering that the $35 set of SuperBassBoost headphones you bought for your portable music device are thoroughly worthless for recording purposes. Is it the fault of the audio recording setup that the headphones you already bought aren't suited to the task? Not especially. Is it the fault of the industry for making a sub-par product with features of questionable merit? Kind of. Is it the fault of the consumer that their needs changed? A bit. Can we place the blame of the extra purchase on to one party? Sure, but no matter which one you pick, it's probably a gross reduction of the truth.

OTOH, in regards to something less physically tangible things like device drivers...well, maybe we can blame the manufacturer a bit more. :)

Re:Potential Linux user thwarted once again

[robzon]

Needing to get new hardware that works for Linux is effectively giving the Operating System a cost.
Yeah, but it still doesn't get anywhere close to Vista! If you want to get Vista you need to pay for the os AND for the new hardware AND for some tranquilizers...

Windows OGG support

[zoward]

I know you said "out of the box", but for those who are looking to add it (as I was a while ago for use at work), Ogg Vorbis support for Windows Media Player can be found here.

But I am a shaw.ca customer!

[Anonymous Coward]

No bittorrent for me. Anytime bittorrent is running on a shaw connection EVERYTHING (including bittorrent) runs at about 5k/s.

Bastards.

Re:But I am a shaw.ca customer!

[owlstead]

Vote with your wallet, or if that isn't an option, spam'm to pieces. Most people don't complain, so you will have to complain for them. I'd guess that only 1/1000 people do actually complain about that, and the company won't take action before about 25% of customers complains. So get started, 250 complaints to go (most complainers only send only complaint, so this is the low count...).

Re:But I am a shaw.ca customer!

[abigor]

I use Shaw too. I don't think it's their fault, as I get good rates. Have you opened up an incoming port in your firewall/router?

Broadcom

[drachenstern]

Yes, but has there been any more progress with the Broadcom crap-sets for wireless? I realize that modules are more in the realm of kernel-land than in the UI space, but for when you want to demo for a laptop, and they got a BC (like mine and my wife's LTs) then it doesn't look sooooo wonderful.

In addition, who wants to recommend a good internal (non-PCMCIA) wireless that can replace my craptastic Broadcom AirForce 43xx for an HP or a Compaq branded laptop. (oblig response: Yes I've seen the ubuntu forums, but I trust the responders on /. a little more) Main requirement: Cheap.

Re:Broadcom

[neowolf]

My Broadcom wireless card in my Dell laptop worked as soon as I installed Gutsy (well, actually starting with an earlier Tribe/Beta of Gutsy).

For the record- despite hours and hours of tweaks and NDISWrapper suggestions from the Internet, I had never been able to get this card to work prior to now. I had just written off wireless access while running Ubuntu.

Now- works like a charm!

Re:Broadcom

[SkankinMonkey]

Yes, they fixed this in one of the latter betas! It made me so happy after spending hours extracting firmware and setting it up myself! (Quite an endeavor for someone trying to learn Linux like myself.) Now it's part of the drivers that you just have to click a box and say you agree that you're using software as it wasn't originally intended to be used.

Re:Broadcom

[cwelch]

I have 7.04 Feisty on my Dell Latitude 120L with a Broadcomm 43xx wifi card, and it took about 10 minutes after reading UbuntuGuide's http://ubuntuguide.org/ HowTo on it, and that was the first time I'd booted Linux *EVER*.

Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

For years now, I've been hearing how great Linux is. I've even tried to use it a few times...but everytime I do, I find it lacks hardware support for what I've got.

I own a LinkSys WUSB300N Wireless USB Adapter (http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1160093476789&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper)

If I format my computer and install this new edition of Ubuntu will it detect this device, support encryption, and let me get online without running a bunch of hacks?

If so - I'll install it this weekend! If not, Linux fans, please STFU until things like a wireless adapter I bought at Best Buy works on a default install of your OS.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

If not, Linux fans, please STFU until things like a wireless adapter I bought at Best Buy works on a default install of your OS. Yeah, right, because you and your hardware are the only important things in this world. BTW, does Windows come with drivers for this thing?

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[stoolpigeon]

I'll never forget when I bought a usb wireless thing and then spent three days searching forums before I found the right text files to alter so that the driver would work in XP.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

For *years*...quite literally, *years*...I've been hearing about how great Linux is. How it was always stable and secure, but it *used* to be difficult to use and lack hardware support. But NOW, it's GREAT! Now it's READY to replace windows.

Find an archive of Linux magazine and you can find articles like that all through the 90s.

Now, really, I don't care what OS you, or anyone else, decides to run. I really, really do like Linux. I think it's great. But it really ticks me off when people promote it to be something it's not. It's not a viable replacement for Windows, not yet. It doesn't have robust hardware support. Is it improving? Yeah, it is. And that good, for everyone; including Windows Users (at least IMHO).

But I'm sick and tired of hearing crap like 'we found playing music and watching movies in the new Ubuntu to be every bit as pleasant as it is under OS X or Windows... Wi-Fi, printing, my digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after installation -- no drivers or other software required' only to discover that the perfectly normal hardware I've got, that I buy from local retailers like BestBuy and Circuit City don't work. I'm not talking about fancy specialized things that the average desktop user might not have - I don't care about RAID support (and most home users don't either) or UPS support...but I want my Video card, Wi-Fi, Printer, MP3 player to work.

I'm just tired of hearing the same old, 'This is so easy and works so great' only to format my HD and install it. Then I head over to the Linux websites and Linux forums and I'm told, 'OH yeah - it doesn't ACTUALLY work like that. You need to run this command line guy and then go and download some drivers that are written for XP. Then do this, and that, and edit this. Now, modprobe this ndiswrap that and then, if you are lucky, your wi-fi will work. But it won't support encryption, and it's going to add overhead because we've added a software emulation layer. Oh and it will randomly drop your connection from time to time.'

So I hear Linux is as easy to use (only it took hours and multiple visits to get my WiFi to even sorta work), I hear Linux is more secure (only now I can't encrypt my wireless connection), I hear Linux is faster/more efficient (but I'm adding another layer/additional overhead to get online) and, on top of it all....the unsecured, CPU-cycle stealing, difficult to configure connection drops randomly.

And this is just my last attempt with Linux. There have been 4 others over the past 9 years or so...every time I read about how great Linux is and how it 'finally' has great hardware support and 'just works' I decide to give it a try only to discover that I can't do what I want.

Hell, I even posted an open-ended question in the Ubuntu forums asking someone, anyone, to link me to a specific wireless USB adapter that I can plug in/install Ubuntu and have it work. Without knowing the Chipset, or using fake drivers, or whatever; but not a single person provided me with anything. I'd be willing to buy a new adapter just to run Ubuntu, if someone could just point me to one that works.

If it's *that* hard to find a wireless USB adapter that is actually supported by the OS without hacks and crap - well, I'd say it's pretty unfair and misleading to tell people it's on the same level as Windows.

And yes, my hardware is all I actually care about when it comes to hardware support. And no, I don't care whose fault it is. If the hardware I buy comes with a CD with drivers on it for Windows and not for Linux - guess what? It works in Windows and not in Linux. I know that it's not the fault of Linux, I know that it doesn't make Linux a bad OS...but what Linux fans need to realise is that the lack of drivers means there is a lack of hardware support for Linux.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "desktop" Ubuntu CD boots up all the way to the desktop without going into installation. So you can run and try Ubuntu without touching your hard disk. You will know very quickly whether or not your devices would work.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Kjella]

Never experienced anything like that. Oh yes, I've experienced that drivers don't work *well*, but you don't ship something that doesn't work at all with 90% of your market. Most people limit their incompetance to something that can be passed around - the hardware guys blame the driver developers who blame the outsourcing company who blame their subcontractors, with several layers of management fingerpoint of who the incompentents are and who hired them. Not shipping a working driver is the kind of cock-up that'll make heads roll.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should send your opinion on this to the hardware manufacturer whose product doesn't work for you in Linux. It could be that you will not get an answer from them, but if noone complains about this to them, they might not even start to consider fixing the situation

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Hatta]

It's your own damn fault for buying hardware from people who won't open their specs. When you purchase hardware, you have to check that it's compatible for the application you want it for. Would you complain that Ford parts won't work in your Toyota car? Of course not. Well it's the same situation here.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

Believe it or not...I actually have complained to LinkSys. I recieved a generic sort of auto-reply via email. But still, I tried.

But none of that changes the fact that, for years, Linux promoters have been overselling the support and experience of Linux. So I'm bitching about that here, too.

Like I said, I like Linux and I do wish hardware manufactures would do more to provide Linux drivers/brand their hardware as Linux compatible/sell computers with Linux pre-installed, etc, etc...

I just wish people would be honest about what Linux is and what it currently does. And some people are, but there are too many fanboys the drown them out.

Every OS has 100% hardware support for all of the devices that is supports perfectly.

Somehow, the above is enough to make people think Linux has great hardware support. Sure, it has great hardware support for the things it supports...but for everything else, which for the last...I dunno, 8 years, has included things I've already bought.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

Yes, but knowing that my devices don't work does very little to support the idea that Linux offers robust, out of the box, support for hardware.

When people read articles like this, and the general comments of Linux fans; they get the impression that Linux is as easy to install as Windows and offers the same level of support as Windows.

Look at how many people rag on Vista for hardware issues and drivers that cause their systems to crash. Vista as a tool too, to identify hardware that doesn't work - but unless I'm willing to go out and buy an entirely new computer with the sole purpose of running Linux on it; odds are, I'm going to have *something* that doesn't really work right.

For me, currently, it's that I can't get online without running a 40 foot CAT-5 Cable. I'm not willing to do that, and I'm not willing to run an OS that can't go online. I *am* willing to buy a new USB network adapter that works correctly in a default install of Ubuntu without any editing of config files or ndiswrap'in - but I've yet to have anyone point me to a USB network adapter that fits that criteria.

So it's frustrating when articles promoting ease of use and hardware compatibility pop-up.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[PinkyDead]

Yes and no. I've been running the beta for about 3 weeks now.

When I installed it, it found the hardware no problem, but it just wouldn't pick up the wireless network.

I had to work on it for a while but eventually I found that if you turn on the wireless with the little button on the keyboard, it works. (Slaps forehead).

So yes it works, but no it's not completely muppet proof. As the man says - try out the LiveCD.

But wow! Does Compiz rock or what - make sure you install the compiz manager dealy, hours of fun there. And no problem finding my printer either. Mega thumbs up.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll have to download and burn the CD first anyway, so before you format your machine and install the OS you should just boot the Live CD and try it out. If your wifi works there, you'll know you can do a real install and have network access from the start.

Good luck, hope it works!

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[nowhere.elysium]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=530772

You gonna be a bit more polite, now?

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

Yes - it is my own damn fault.

Them: "Linux is great! It's as easy as Windows! Pop-in a CD and everything works! It's so user friendly now!"

Me: "Umm - my WiFi adapter doesn't seem to work"

You: "Well, you suck! It's your own damn fault! What did you expect?! LINUX to WORK with your WiFi adapter!?! What are you...STUPID? RETARDED? "

Me: "Umm - I dunno, I bought a WiFi adapter from Best Buy - none of the boxes say 'Linux Supported' on them. Seriously, not one. I even went to the Linux forums and asked for anyone to link me to an adapter I could buy online and nobody did. I even made this anti-linux post on SlashDot, where some guy said it was my own damn fault and while he made fun of me for expecting Linux to support my Wi-Fi adapter - even he couldn't provide for me a link to a wireless USB adapter that would be supported on a clean install of Ubuntu....'

So seriously, am I just a retarded who can't find a wireless USB adapter for Linux? Are there hundreds of people out there laughing because 'everyone' knows which wireless USB adapter I *should* have bought? Or is it really that nobody can actually point me to one?

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Synthaxx]

Just boot the livecd and find out. No formatting needed.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

Umm - not after reading that crap....

First 'ndiswrapper' is a hack. It adds overhead, often fails to support encryption, limits the transfer speed, requires a seperate XP driver, and then for me, I experienced frequent disconnects.

I never said you couldn't hack together a quazi-solution to get my wi-fi up and working; what I said was, Linux people are misleading when they talk about hardware support and ease of use. If you are going to honestly tell me that doing....

--
Download the drivers:
http://www.atvnation.com/WUSB300N.tar

Extract them to /opt/ndis/:
  mkdir /opt/ndis
  tar xvf WUSB300N.tar -C /opt/ndis/
  cd /opt/ndis/Drivers

Install the Driver using NDISWrapper
  sudo ndiswrapper -i netmw245.inf

        installing netmw245 ...

# sudo ndiswrapper -l

        netmw245 : driver installed

  sudo modprobe ndiswrapper ... go ahead and plug in the adapter ...

  sudo dmesg | grep ndis

        "[ 9273.652000] ndiswrapper version 1.38 loaded (preempt=no,smp=yes)
        [ 9273.712000] usbcore: registered new interface driver ndiswrapper
        [ 9340.364000] ndiswrapper: driver netmw245 (Linksys, A Division of Cisco Systems, Inc.,12/07/2006,1.0.5.1) loaded"

You should now be able to go to your Network Applet Icon and see wireless network in the list. ... or the command iwconfig should return an entry for wlan0, mine looks like this:

        wlan0 IEEE 802.11FH ESSID:off/any
        Mode:Managed Channel:0 Access Point: Not-Associated
        Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Sensitivity=-200 dBm
        RTS thr=2346 B Fragment thr=2346 B
        Encryption key:off
        Power Management:off
        Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
        Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
        Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

If you have an unprotected wireless hub, then issue this command to connect:
# sudo dhcpclient wlan0

I changed my instructions listed above, so if you ran into trouble, here is how you need to undo the changes.

I assumed incorrectly that ndiswrapper loads the inf file and you don't need it on the system any more ... this is incorrect. When you reboot the system, all of the contents of /tmp goes away and it breaks the WUSB300N. To undo this do the following:

1. The driver is still installed, but it is in a funky state because the inf file is missing. If you need to, download the tar file again as mentioned above and copy it to /opt/ndis/ as mention in the beginning of the instructions above.

2. You now have to delete the old driver, so copy the four files in the tar to the /tmp/Drivers/ directory like it originally was before you rebooted, then issue this command:

        # sudo ndiswrapper -r netmw254

-- Now follow the instructions listed above ... sorry for the confusion.

--

If you think thats as easy as it is in Windows, you are on crack. And even when it's up and working it's crap compared to how it performs in Windows. It's not supported by a default install.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only one recommendation -- stop buying shit hardware and expecting it to work.

I plug things into my box, and they "just work." I got all geeky one day, started pulling random things out of boxes, plugging them into my box and saying "hey lets see if this works.... OMG it does !!! Awesome!!!" I ran into VERY few things that weren't supported, but then again I don't shop Best Buy going "okay what is the absolutely cheapest POS I can buy that says it does what I want?"

With bigger names opening their eyes and realizing Linux is the OS moving forward the fastest, we'll see more and more OFFICIAL driver support as well. I equate the modern Linux experience more to the Mac than to Windows -- you may need to be a bit more selective with your purchasing decision, but in the end you're rewarded with better usability and stability.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[tiocsti]

Linux supports more devices out of the box than windows does. It's that simple.

I'm willing to bet your usb wifi device was not supported by windows out of the box, it's almost certain it came with a windows driver. No OS can support every device ever made.

If you stick to hardware where specs are available, it will usually work well in all oses. If you use hardware which doesnt make specs available, it will usually only work in windows, and even there sometimes not well (depends how well they wrote the driver).

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - and you retards complain about Windows....When it's compatible with most everything (and pays the price, obviously, for that compatability).

So, shoe on other foot - why don't you shutup?

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Hatta]

It took me about a minute on google to find this. It's not my fault, or Ubuntu's fault that you can't be arsed to do your own research.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Technician]

Not all hardware is supported by all operating systems. Get used to it. I recently retired a Windows 2000 Pro installation. The biggest reason was ****Hardware Support****. I travel and do Power Point presentations and support others that do the same. As such often a presenter will have his presentation on a USB flash drive. Just for fun, take any modern collection of USB flash drives and plug them into a Windows 2000 laptop.. The endless search for an internet connection on the road to download drivers finally got to me. I Installed Dapper Drake and have been very happy since.

Do a little research and find a supported WiFi card. Most Intel cards are supported out of the box now so your Centrino Laptop should just work.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-022095.htm

Many adaptors bought at Best Buy does work on Ubuntu just fine. Check your chipset first. The only way to get support for the Linux holdouts is make it a support, return and market share issue for them. If you have an incompatible card, call the company and ask for drivers. If they don't have drivers, ask for a refund. They will get the picture if it becomes a big enough issue for them.

By the way, I have an older Thinkpad T21 which doesn't have built in wireless. I use a D-link Air-Express PCMCIA card with a supported chipset. It works fine.

http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html

Think about what you are saying... I would rather use a $200 OS instead of buying a $40 card to use a free OS. I fail to see the logic unless you just happened to already have a $200 OS just sitting unused someplace.

In the case of my laptop, it was buy something to replace Windows 2000, or buy a compatible card. Since the laptop didn't come with a card, I would need to buy one regardless. I just made sure it was Linux compatible when I bought it.

http://www.etheros.com/news/DLink2.html
http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

This is what I don't understand....why do people want to come out and defend Linux so much?

'Linux supports more devices out of the box than windows does. It's that simple.'

Yes - because Linux *has* to. The fact of the matter is, you'd be VERY hard pressed to find a single piece of hardware you can purchase that DOESN'T include drivers for Windows. And, you'd be very hard pressed to find hardware that DOES include support for Linux.

So yes, Linux supports more devices 'out of the box' if that's what you want to call it. But if you go and buy 100 different hardware devices from Best Buy, today, at least 99 of them are going to have CDs with Windows Drivers on them. You'd probably find 0 with Linux drivers on them, you'd almost certainly find 0 that proudly displays that it works in Linux.

So while what you say might TECHNICALLY be true, it misleads people. People read that and think 'Oh, Linux has more support for hardware than Windows'. But when they start using Linux and buying hardware - they'll learn the truth the hard way. Just like I did.

So why even say it? You and I both know that it doesn't mean what people are going to understand it to mean.

Why don't we change our meaning of 'out of the box' to be 'including everything in the box'. That means, if I buy a USB Network adapter and it comes with a CD, well that CD comes out of the box too. And it goes in my CD-ROM. If it has Linux drivers, then Linux supports it 'out of the box'. If it has Windows drivers, then Windows supports it out of the box. Use that definition and tell me Linux has more support 'out of the box' than Windows with a straight face...

Think about it, that definition is really more meaningul to consumers. They don't have to track anything down, edit any files, 99% of the time, it's as simple as putting in the CD, plugging in the device and possibly clicking next 1-3 times. That WORKS out of the box.

And again, you suggest that I stick to hardware that has specs...is it just that ALL Wireless USB adapters fail to 'follow specs'? I was under the impression that this was a fair basic/well established technology. Can you point me to a wireless usb network adapter that 'follows the specs' or whatever? One that would work, 'out of the box' (using our new definition of out of the box?)

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[pinkocommie]

The issue isn't ubuntu or linux per se but if the manufacturer supports linux or not. If they don't there's not much that can be done. Some people try to rewrite the drivers or wrap the windows drivers to run on Linux etc
Otoh isn't it more simple to just support (vote w/ur wallet) the companies that are linux friendly? There are lots of wireless cards that support linux.
I setup an edubuntu box recently and instead of trying to figure out how to get something to work, I simply looked up what is known to work and picked it up (from newegg and it has been working flawlessly.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

This is perfect - thank you so much for the Link. What can we all learn from this?

Well, some guy tested 4 different WiFi cards that he hand-selected, and he tested them in four different versions of Ubuntu. That works out to a total of 16 possibilities.

According to him....

The ASUS WL-167G didn't work in any of the four (4 Total Failures)
The Edimax 7318USg didn't work in any of the four (8 Total Failures)
The MSI US54SE doesn't work correctly in any of the four - works 'well enough' to get online in 3 (9 Total Failures, 3 Kinda Works)
The ZyXEL ZyAir G-220 v2 didn't work in three (12 Total Failures) - works correctly in 1 (1 Total Success)

So, according to this blog, of our 16 combinations we have 12 Total Failures, 3 that kinda work, and ONE that does work.

1 out of 16 work correctly.

ONE out of 16.

Well, geez, don't I feel silly. Here I've been spouting off that hardware support for Linux/Ubuntu isn't as great as people make it out to be and here we've found *one* combination of 16 that actually work. Don't I look silly?

And, what did the guy who created that blog have to say about hardware support in Linux?

"Maybe it's a silly idea, but nobody else is offering a list of just-works hardware for just one distro, for the people who want a simple answer. All the lists I've seen so far are vague and out-of-date and/or have a bizarre understanding of "works out-of-the-box". It's time to simplify the question that we are trying to answer."

All the lists he's seen are vague and out-of-date....well, at least I'm not the only one.

But yeah, that guy doesn't know WTF he's talking about; I'm just lazy and can't do my own research.

Oh, and let's remember - that guy didn't pick 4 random WiFi cards - those were hand selected. "I tried four different USB wireless adaptors - the most widely available ones that were most likely to work based on my previous entries."

But - all joking aside, I really do appreciate the link as I'm going to buy the one that he says does work with Gutsy.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[tiocsti]

Try that in 64 bit windows, see how it works out for you.

I dont use usb wifi adapters, but I have no problem with minipci or pcmcia adapters that work in all major operating systems. ath chipsets work well, as do most intel chipsets. Certain intel chipsets need binary drivers, I don't tend to use anything but ath and intel.

I mostly use laptops, and I have no problems getting things working, and most people consider the issues involved with laptop support to be much more challenging than desktop support. Things largely just work (and i mostly use freebsd, which has by most accounts less consumer hardware support than linux).

I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here, but if it really concerns you, the proper thing to do is just not buy from any vendor that doesnt release hardware documentation, which means researching the device (and the chipset the device uses) before purchase.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

You are assuming that I have to pay $200 dollars for Windows.

I'm looking at paying nothing for Vista Ultimate (legit copy)/Windows XP (legit copy) or paying $40 dollars on a wireless card to use an OS that is (arguably) as good as either version of Windows. I know that Linux has a lot of great advantages, but it DOES have a fair number of disadvantages.

I like Linux, I want to use it and support it (and I probably will actually buy the WiFi adapter that will work with it) - but the idea that it's hardware support is at the same level of Windows seems like a joke to me, and I feel as though it's dishonest/misleading/hurtful to the Linux movement.

When you have to investigate the particular chipset because the name on the box won't always work, that's a good sign that whatever you are buying it for lacks good hardware support.

When you have to use things like ndiswrapper, that's a good sign that whatever you are buying lacks good hardware support.

That's not to say Linux is bad, or Linux sucks...I really like Linux and Ubuntu specifically - but when you try to sell a bicycle to someone who wants a car - even if it's a great bicycle; he's going to be disappointed. If you sell a great bicycle to a guy who wants a great bicycle, he's going to be happy.

The general perception people get from the Linux communtiy and how Linux actually is, are two different things. I know myself, and others, who went in expecting everyting we were told about Linux to be true; only to be completely disappointed by what it was. Linux, as it is, is great - it has enough merit, own it's own; to be a serious OS.

Say the truth!

Linux is free, Linux gives you choice, Linux can be very secure, Linux can be very stable, Linux can be difficult to configure, Linux can be a breeze to maintain once correctly configured, Linux supports a lot of hardware...but it DOESN'T support a lot of hardware too, Linux has a lot of great software available to it, but it probably doesn't support a lot of what you currently use, if you play games Linux will cause you headaches, you can probably get anything you want to work, eventually, but it probably won't work as well or as fast as it did in Windows, Linux is easy to use, but it's not windows and there is a learning curve, Linux installs are working better and better out of the box, but you will need to do more to get things how you want it that you had to do in Windows.

Why can't we just say that?

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[stoolpigeon]

I'd have to go home to get the specifics - but this was a usb wi-fi adapter that I bought at Best Buy and it's a major name - I just don't want to guess and be wrong. I'm not exaggerating when I say it took me about 3 days to fix it. I finally found some messages on a forum I'd never heard of and discovered that I needed to download a driver from a completely different company to get some files that IIRC I had to cut from so that I could paste them into other driver files to get the device working with XP. This was in June of 2006.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[RobDude]

I don't think I'm making a mountain out of a molehill...

It's just the same old story; and this is just the most recent attempt - like I've said, I've done this, at least, 3 other times before over a span of roughly 8 years.

'Linux is great, it's easy, it just works; it's READY for the desktop - Windows won't last'

Then I install it.

Then something doesn't work.

Then I try to find help, try a bunch of complicated stuff; most often yeilding no positive results; after spamming support forums I get called a n0ob a few times, told to RTFM, and told to buy new hardware.

That's been my experience with Linux, time and time again.

I say, 'Well, I have a lot of Excel files...are you sure this will work in Linux?'

And people say, 'Oh yes! Open Office is just like Office and it will open your files!'

Then I get Open Office try to open my Excel files, and it doesn't work. So I say, "Umm, hey Linux guys - my stuff don't work"

Then I get the RTFM, it's your fault, blah, blah, and then, eventually some helpful guy will come along and say...

"Ahh, well, OpenOffice can open most .xls files - however some of the functionality isn't supported. All of your Excel files that use VBA won't work. There is an OpenOffice scripting language that can accomplish virtually the same thing; but there is no direct 1-to-1 conversion tool. You'll have to learn this new scripting language and re-code everything you had in VBA before it will work".

So, to summarize, here is the 'Linux-Experience Life-Cycle'

1.) Hype over ______
2.) Decide to try _______
3.) Realize ______ doesn't work as described
4.) Ask why
5.) Get flamed
6.) Flame back
7.) Get helpful answer explaining that _____ was hyped up and what you are trying to do doesn't work because it won't work but you can try some other _______ or maybe do ________.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

where's the redundant mod? for the first time ever, it's actually warranted.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[debest]

researching the device (and the chipset the device uses) before purchase.

This is always good advice. But, to be in somewhat of an agreement with the GP, even this may not help you.

I remember buying my first Linksys PCI Wirless-B card, which I had checked online as being compatible with Linux. Turns out Linksys decided to re-do the card with a different chipset that was unsupported (Broadcom, I believe), but did NOT change the card's model number, only its "revision" number. The outside packaging gave no indication of the change. The only way to tell which revision of the card you had was to physically examine the tiny writing on the PCB of the card. Not exactly a positive experience when buying hardware for Linux!

That said, however, the situation is better than it was. But it is still frustrating. There will always be more problems here, because there will always be hardware vendors that insist upon distributing only binary drivers. Hopefully, Linux "market share" will grow enough that these vendors will actually see the loss of sales enough that they may change their position on this.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[brunascle]

I *am* willing to buy a new USB network adapter that works correctly in a default install of Ubuntu without any editing of config files or ndiswrap'in - but I've yet to have anyone point me to a USB network adapter that fits that criteria.

here. look at the reviews, ctl-f for Ubuntu or Linux.

here's one. $16 and the reviews say it works with ubuntu fine.

this is not hard.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Technician]

The general perception people get from the Linux communtiy and how Linux actually is, are two different things. I know myself, and others, who went in expecting everyting we were told about Linux to be true; only to be completely disappointed by what it was.

In general, there are a few out there who have problems. For me, the general impression is absolutely everything worked without needing to download a single driver. Not everyone has had that experiance. Having put Ubuntu on 5 machines, I have had problmes with only one.

Linux is free, Linux gives you choice, Linux can be very secure, Linux can be very stable, Linux can be difficult to configure, Linux can be a breeze to maintain once correctly configured, Linux supports a lot of hardware...but it DOESN'T support a lot of hardware too, Linux has a lot of great software available to it, but it probably doesn't support a lot of what you currently use, if you play games Linux will cause you headaches, you can probably get anything you want to work, eventually, but it probably won't work as well or as fast as it did in Windows, Linux is easy to use, but it's not windows and there is a learning curve, Linux installs are working better and better out of the box, but you will need to do more to get things how you want it that you had to do in Windows.

Why can't we just say that?

In most cases I found Linux worked better than Linux. In Windows, I needed a third party application to burn an ISO CD when I decided to try Ubuntu. The starter version of the application installed on the XP machine sadly would not burn an ISO. It required a $$$ upgrade. Online I found a free ISO burner instead.

you can probably get anything you want to work, eventually, but it probably won't work as well or as fast as it did in Windows

In most cases of what I do, I found Linux worked better than Windows.

Burning an ISO in Ubuntu is much better than in Windows. After you install the illegal in the US DVD CSS Library, watching movies is much better. Since it isn't blessed by the DVD consortium and isn't following their manditory rules, the DVD player does what I always wanted a DVD player to do. Play the movie. If I want to watch the previews, extras, and FBI warning, I can always bring up a menu and watch them later. What a nice feeling. I put in the movie and it plays.. No wait.

In Windows, installing flash is a global event forcing it on all users. Some sites I visit I would prefer flash to be not even installed due to the nature of the advertising. Having to respond to a bunch of prompts using a flash block or script block can be a pain. In Ubuntu the flash install is per user and can be installed by each user. Nice.

In Windows trying to fix some things is terrible. People make remarks about the command prompt. The command prompt is much easier to deal with than trying to figure out a hosed scanner install in the Windows registry. Uninstall and reinstallation of software rarely fixes a bad software install in Windows as the registry often keeps the bad configuration for you.

Here is a prime example... I downloaded a software photocopier on the wife's XP machine and installed a flatbed scanner. Everything worked fine. Later we needed to edit a photo. We fired up the included photo editing program.. Instead of running, it installed a 30 day demo. Alas, it was a 30 day demo that expired 6 months ago. It seemed to be tied to the XP start date so you couldn't simply reinstall every 30 days. This software install broke the photocopier. The photocopier starts just fine. The flatbed scanner scans just fine. The photo editor hijacked the output of the scanner. The operation of the scanner loads the expired photo editor. I uninstalled the photo editor. Now the scanner runs and Windows tells me it can't find the photo editor and offers to help me find the missing .exe. XP has been broken for 2 years now as I am unable to find the problem. Configuration files in Ubu

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Provocateur]

An alternative I've found, since I tinker with various live CDs so much, when trying out hardware: I plop in a liveCD and see if that distro detects the HW and the HW works. Then I know that support *is* out there, I just have to find out how that particular distro made it work. If it doesn't work for one then I try another liveCD.

I also just don't search the distro's forums, I search various distro forums. Like for getting dual monitors to work using aTi in Mandriva, I've turned to the Ubuntu and Gentoo discussion forums to see their various tweaks and tips.

Re:Does it Support My Wi-Fi Adapter?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I plop in a liveCD and see if that distro detects the HW and the HW works. Then I know that support *is* out there, I just have to find out how that particular distro made it work.

Not only that, but in the unlikely event that the live CD drives the hardware and the install doesn't, you can sniff a running live CD system to see how it did it.

Then you can mount partitions of the installed system and copy your notes and any configuration files for later tweaking-in, or hack away on the installed version's configuration files directly. If you somehow manage to break the installed version to the point it won't boot (and kept copies of the unmodified files you tweaked) you can just bring up the live CD, mount the partition, and put the files back like it was.

I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[s_p_oneil]

...but is the Ralink rt2500(PCI) driver in this version working? It really sucked to go from Ubuntu 6.x where it sort of worked (it was a real pain to set up WPA, and the connection died every hour), to Ubuntu 7.04 where it didn't work at all. I don't want to bother downloading Gutsy if it's not going to work.

(Please don't tell me "it works if you use ndiswrapper or download XYZ after you install Linux" because I can't download ANYTHING without a working network driver. My home PC is nowhere near where the Internet cable comes into my house, and I'm not going to drag it across the house and back so I can spend a few hours setting it up just to see if it works as poorly as it did in 6.x.)

Re:I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[Paradigm_Complex]

Gutsy's got new ralink drivers. It may help with your card, but sadly it broke my ralink2570(usb). I blacklisted the "new" drivers and compiled/installed the old ones, and things seem to be okay so far. So, maybe yes maybe no. Although for future reference, if you're doing anything that could kill your internet connection - that requires an internet connection to fix - it would likely be in your best interest to leave a partition with a fully function OS. If it's Windows, then so be it, or another linux distro/version that you know works fine.

Re:I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[s_p_oneil]

Thanks for the tip, but I'm already doing that. ;-) The first two-thirds of my drive are dedicated to Windows XP and the last third is free for installing whatever I feel like playing with (BSD, Ubuntu, RedHat). The only time I've ever had a problem with a dual-boot install was with PC-BSD. FreeBSD worked fine, but PC-BSD blew away my C partition (fortunately I keep all my important stuff on D).

If Gutsy has newer rt2500 drivers than Feisty, maybe I'll give it a try.

Re:I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[fritzk3]

I suppose that the upside here is that you can try the LiveCD without having to install anything... and the LiveCD should give at least some indication as to the (non-)functionality of your wireless device.

Re:I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[s_p_oneil]

Definitely. Just wondering whether it was worth the trouble to download and burn it. ;-)

Re:I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[Derek Loev]

I use the rt2570 (usb) and on Gentoo it was as simple as emerge rt2570 but I've found in the majority of other distros it's a pain to get it working. Right now my I can only use wireless on my computer so unless it's really easy for me to get my wireless card working (out of the box support would be nice) then I'm not even going to bother trying it.

Re:I know it's not Ubuntu's responsibility...

[MrNiCeGUi]

I have an Asus WL107G PCMCIA card with a Ralink 2500 chipset and it worked with no config necessary, except of course the password with WPA (TKIP+PSK, will change it later to AES). In 7.04 it was really a pain to get it working with anything except WEP, which is worthless, and it was very unstable. I have installed the 7.10 beta about a month or so ago, but the subsequent updates have not broken anything yet and I presume that at the moment I have 7.10 final.

Completely offtopic, I hate Grub with a passion and wish there was more control in the setup for the bootloader. I know it is supposed to be newbie friendly, but that does not mean that I have to pull my hair out looking for a place to select the bootloader type and location.

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[RobDude]

I need WiFi support from the wireless adapater I already own.

Let me know when Linux supports it? It's a LinkSys WUSB300N. If you could, just shoot an email to robdude01@hotmail.com when I can plug that sucker in, install Ubuntu and have it auto detected, supporting WEP, and allow me to surf the web without running hacks or using drivers intended for other OSes, or manually editing config files.

Thinkpad Savage Video

[Byteme]

Will the video on my Thinkpad now work???

RALINK drivers

[MancunianMaskMan]

the ralink rt2500 driver is somehow borked, at least wireless doesn't work in gutsy any more unless i boot the old feisty kernel. Now there is a "windows" driver that you can install with ndiswrapper and that's supposed to work, and support the "network manager" interface as well, which the open source driver doesn't.

That's supposed to be the other way 'round, open sopurce stuff is hackable and someone could fix that particular piece of opensource code, but somehow it's not happening. I haven't got the skill or time to do it. Looks like that chipset is going to fade into obscurity before it gets quality linux support!

Ubuntu Server needs work.

[rindeee]

While Ubuntu on the desktop is the bee's knees, server leaves me unimpressed. While I'm not expecting a "big-iron" capable monster with every service imaginable, what I would expect is the "Ubuntu touch"; The most useful, advanced and friendly services at the "administrator's" fingertips, easily managed, configured, etc. LAMP is a nice start, but how about a full sweet of ready to go "stuff". XMPP, SIP, VPN, Doc Mgt, etc. If Ubuntu could do for servers what they've done for desktops, well, that would be really good. ;) In the interim, I'll stick with CentOS (no, I'm not comparing CentOS to Ubuntu).

Re:Ubuntu Server needs work.

[GenP]

Isn't this what eBox is supposed to do? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBox

Re:Ubuntu Server needs work.

[CompMD]

"While Ubuntu on the desktop is the bee's knees, server leaves me unimpressed." ...which is why we have Debian. It isn't necessarily a good thing to have servers in the hands of people that can't use them without a pretty X interface.

Re:Ubuntu Server needs work.

[Cl1mh4224rd]

I'd be happy if they just fixed the boot-up on their newer server editions. I can't comment on 7.10, since I haven't tried the server version, but with 6.10 and 7.04, you pretty much can't set up Apache with SSL and a passworded certificate.

During boot, the Apache daemon will start, and it will prompt you to enter the password for the certificate, but Ubuntu just continues to ignorantly spew output to the screen while the boot-up sequence continues.

That is, frankly, kind of dumb.

Re:Ubuntu Server needs work.

[HW_Hack]

I haven't tried Ubuntu server since 6.10 ------ all I recall is it booting and then dumping me at the command prompt ????? At least Fedora server booted into a very minimal X-Windows enviroment ..... command line is fine but I at least expect a multi-windowed environment out of the chute.

Re:Ubuntu Server needs work.

[snuf23]

Well...

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

I think it's more unusual that sshd isn't installed by default. I guess the overall deal with ubuntu server is to go completely minimal and let you configure it yourself. Which isn't a bad idea.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[murraj2]

While the video drivers should just work and probably will for most people. I had a different experience, after the upgrade(which I did on Sunday) was done it prompted me to reboot, after I did this it went to grub, and then the ubuntu screen with the loading status bar. Afterwards I got a black screen on my laptop. Rebooted, same thing. Plugged it into my dock to try that, and the monitor didn't receive a signal. The only thing I could do was get into recovery mode and get to the console.

I would recommend that before you upgrade, and just in general, you burn a live CD, so that if something wrong you have a way of at least connecting to the internet and getting to ubuntu forums. I actually had to use my Wii to post to the ubuntu forums where someone was able to give me an hpkg reconfigure command that I could use in recovery mode. Wasn't too fun typing on my Wii.

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[realmolo]

Oh, come on. I dig Ubuntu, I even used it exclusively for a few months, but it's not a replacement for Windows yet. It's CLOSE. But there are many things that are hard to do in Ubuntu/Linux-in-general that are dead-simple to accomplish in Windows XP.

Ubuntu needs to do everything Windows does, and do it better/easier if it wants to succeed as a replacement for Windows on the desktop.

Stay out of the forums for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue thousands of Ubuntu noobs hammering the forums 'cause they can't work out how to edit a fucking text file.

URGENT!!!!! They will entitle their pleas.
But this works on Winblows!!! They will offer by way of justification for their interminable stupidity.

Do yourself a favour and stay away from the forums until they've given up and gone back to Vista.

Re:Stay out of the forums for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why more people don't drop Windows for Linux. Try welcoming them and being patient rather than being a smart-ass and pissing them off from the get-go and the market share for Linux might actually increase. Which is the goal, right?

Re:Stay out of the forums for a while.

[mindwanderer]

Great attitude. That'll really help spread Linux to the masses.

Re:Stay out of the forums for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's okay. As the OP said, we don't want them to drop Windows for Linux.

Re:Stay out of the forums for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

The goal is to be able to do what we need to do, and find out what we need to find out, without having to wade through thread upon thread of fucking 12 year olds moaning that "it doesn't work like Windows", "it doesn't look like OSX", and that they "shouldn't *have* to edit config files to set up an FTP server" to share their warez with their mates. Fuck them. All of them.

Unix is meant to be hard. It keeps the idiots out of data centers.

I put it to you, AC, that Ubuntu is the cancer that is killing Linux.

Re:Stay out of the forums for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! The masses can suck it.

I see you there, with your 7 digit UID, posting from your parents' basement, running Ubuntu on your daddy's laptop. You are one of them. You are the cancer that is killing Linux.

Re:Stay out of the forums for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same AC here.

I'm not directing this towards new Linux users in general, it's just the fuckwits that Ubuntu is marketed at. They seem to have a noobness all their own, and are apparently unable to use the 'I Feel Lucky' button at Google.

For example, if you are having trouble setting up dovecot with TLS, and have read the docs, but can't quite get your head round a particular issue, then I'm all ears, and will assist in any way possible.
If you can't mount your fucking USB stick, because it doesn't appear on the brown desktop of Ubunto, despite the 4000 hits for the same issue on Google, then you can fuck right off.

PPC

[Jerry Smith]

Is it true they dropped ppc support? I just cleaned out my G4 for this :(

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you can still get a semi-official PPC version here: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/7.10/release/

Re:PPC

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurray! *torrenting already*

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[PrescriptionWarning]

I used the upgrade feature for two of my computers I use on a daily basis, and both of them upgraded without any issues :) do the upgrade!

Nvidia

[jwsmith00]

I've been running Gutsy-RC for a week now. I won't be upgrading to Gutsy Gibbon until some issues with the video card and battery life are resolved; noting that I think the two are related.

I am running an HP DV2000 laptop (2310). A Turion 64 X2 processor with an Nvidia Geforce Go 6150. I use i386, not AMD64 since the Flash player won't install on AMD64. To the point, the nvidia drivers crash X with the "-14" kernel but they work fine with the "-12" kernel. Since the release probably comes only with -12, I won't be able to use the fancy 3D effects.

I also found that battery life on Gutsy was about an hour shorter than Feisty. I suspect that the Nvidia drivers for my video card are the cause of the problem. Longer battery life was supposed to be part of Gutsy, so I don't see a point in upgrading. Compiz also locks occasionally with the Nvidia drivers.

So I'm waiting for a new Nvidia driver before I make the leap to Gutsy. Hopefully a new driver will fix display issues -and- battery life.

Re:Nvidia

[sabrebutt]

FYI, gutsy does have working flash for AMD64. You may want to try it.

Re:Nvidia

[jwsmith00]

Excellent! I tried AMD64 and it worked along with the NVidia drivers. But my laptop still runs very hot. Almost like I'm playing an EA Sports game on windows, that's how hot the laptop is.

Bittorrent client

[ealar dlanvuli]

Everyone, please stop using Azerus. Deluge is a native gtk bittorrent client that supports encryption and is speed-comparable to uTorrent. It is in "Add/Remove Programs" in 7.10.

Sean

Re:Bittorrent client

[J_Omega]

your post seems so off-topic... not sure why I bother to respond.

stop using Azureus WHY? Because you said please?
Speed comparable to uTorrent? Isn't torrent speed indifferent to the client used?

Re:Bittorrent client

[TheThiefMaster]

No, a client is perfectly capable of being slow.

Azureus is considered bad because it uses 10-100 or more times the system resources of uTorrent (which is now the official bittorrent client), and some of its implementations of newer bittorrent features (eg DHT) are incompatible with the version in the official client or any other client.

The only advantage it had over uTorrent was that it was "free". This new client means that there is no reason to use Azureus any more.

Re:Bittorrent client

[Hatta]

rtorrent is even better.

Re:Bittorrent client

[ealar dlanvuli]

I posted it because I noted the majority of my peers were using Azureus while downloading the new iso. Obviously, people were just not aware there are robust alternatives, because not many people choose Azureus if given a native alternative that works.

(I have nothing against Azureus or Java, it's just that their current implementation chugs system resources like crazy)

Re:Bittorrent client

[theantipop]

If I had a dime for everytime someone told me to use their torrent client...

Re:Bittorrent client

[Anonymous Coward]

I posted it because I noted the majority of my peers were using Azureus while downloading the new iso. Obviously, people were just not aware there are robust alternatives, because not many people choose Azureus if given a native alternative that works.

Huh, interesting. So you think the only reason people use Azureus is because they're not aware that alternatives exist? Weird. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I like Azureus?

Aside from having a nice interface whose speed doesn't bother me at all because I've got a nice computer, I also like the remote Swing and HTML interfaces, built-in tracker (with SSL), auto-speed plugins, advanced seeding rules, and the fact that the interface works the same way on my Windows, Linux, and OS X boxes. (yes, I have computers running all three, and yes, I've used all of them for downloading torrents) How many other torrent programs do that? And do they do it well enough that I'd want to bother learning a new interface?

Re:Bittorrent client

[ealar dlanvuli]

Huh, interesting. So you think the only reason people use Azureus is because they're not aware that alternatives exist? Yes.

Re:Bittorrent client

[Serpent Mage]

Admittedly I did not know about deluge, however, I have used a ton of different torrent clients and settled on Azureus (which requires quite a bit of effort to obtain and used compared to others) because it is the most robust and powerful torrent client I've used. I've actually switched a lot of people away from a number of different torrent clients they were using to using Azureus because they too much like myself like all the whiz bang cool features of Azureus even though we rarely need, use, or bother looking at them.

The screenshots of Deluge do look promising but they also seem to be lacking some of the cool statistics of Azureus. I'll give it a shot certainly and see but then again, I find java to simple be a nice powerful language anyway and much better then python which is what it looks like Deluge is written on (so not really any advantage over Azureus other then it has a lot of features stripped out of it thus giving it perhaps an appearance of being faster but if you disable all of the whizbang in azureus, it actually flies super fast with minimal resources as well).

Seeing comments like

This means that FAT32 won't work, no matter what your preference is set to. If you want to share a drive with Windows, use NTFS-3g or EXT3 and then install the windows driver for it (http://www.fs-driver.org/)

make me question why I would use it really when I know that Azureus actually will work with my usb memory sticks and such as well.

Re:Bittorrent client

[hawk]

Sure. But we're going to spread it across 1000 servers!

hawk

Re:Bittorrent client

[stinerman]

I'll switch to Deluge once the damn thing works. UPnP doesn't work for me, which is a major deal breaker. The latest version in Debian Sid segfaults when I start it up.

They've got awhile to go before I switch away from Azureus.

Re:Bittorrent client

[An Onerous Coward]

Just curious, but how does kTorrent stack up? It seems small and fast. Any reason to switch?

Re:Bittorrent client

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone, please stop using Azerus.

Everyone, please start using Azerus. It is cross platform, stable, fast, true open source, and one of the most used bittorrent clients.

Re:Bittorrent client

[Anonymous Coward]

No, kTorrent is fine. If you're running Gnome though, and you don't want to load the QT/KDE libraries, you might consider Deluge. It offers similar features but has no dependencies on QT or KDE libraries.

Re:Bittorrent client

[AbRASiON]

I've heard this "azureus lags your machine" rubbish for years, it hasn't been like that in a long long time, it's quite snappy now and absoloutely one of the most powerful torrent clients around, the plugins are splendid.

I tried utorrent, didn't like it, went back to Azureus, sure it's 9x the size and hell even if it does take 2x the ram it's still better looking, more powerful and in my eyes, easier to use.

Also 3D... broken

[xtracto]

Yup, I upgraded already to 7.10 from 7.04 via the recommended update-manager and after finishing the update and restarting my computer my ATI 3D acceleration stopped working :(. There is no way to blame the closed source drivers since my chipset is (supposed to be) supported by the open source ATI drivers and are not supported by the closed source drivers...

Everything was working "almost" (as has always been the case with Linux for me) in my laptop with Ubuntu 7.04 (I had to press twice the wireless network button after turning on the computer, no suspend, USB keyboard does not work after hibernate resume, etc etc etc...),

After the upgrade, the wireless works very well (no need to press the button to deactivate and reactivate wireless) but now the 3D DRI rendering is not working...

Oh well... at least in my experience that is the way Linux has behaved in all my computers.

goatse

[Anonymous Coward]

when i first read the release name goatse gibbon, i thought to my self great now i have to download the hole release

These reviews are hilarious

[MeditationSensation]

works out of the box!

Re:These reviews are hilarious

[Jeld]

Well, nowadays it is not a given. Vista didn't :)

Installation Usage?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ubuntu can't win, if that's your attitude, unless you bought a Dell. Even then, it can't win, due to patent issues.

But regardless, it's an odd attitude. By your definition, the pleasantness of something is defined by whether or not it was installed and ready to go by default.

I have a different definition: I care about whether it's actually more pleasant to use once installed. I also care about installation, but that's really secondary -- if a better program takes a little more work, I will use it. Isn't that why people buy Microsoft Office, and often install it themselves, rather than using the built-in Notepad or Wordpad?

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Randle_Revar]

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

Re:yawn......

[Anonymous Coward]

It's name for your boring BSD brethren is Ubuntu 7.10

Metalinks also posted

[Ougarou]

If your favorite mirror is going down under the pressure, try using a metalink for download:

sudo apt-get install aria2
aria2c -M http://metamirrors.nl/files/ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386_iso.metalink

More information and metalinks on http://metamirrors.nl/node/139

Gaming Falls to the Winner

[mecenday]

I see many weakish answers to this post, but the simplest answer is that Linux simply isn't a gamer's OS right now. And that's fine.

It isn't something anyone developing Linux or working on Ubuntu can just fix. Gaming is always going to fall to the OS with the biggest installbase because of the money involved. All the Linux folks can do is keep polishing and pushing to make desktop Linux a better experience... so that one day they'll have a profitable userbase for the gaming companies to address.

Maybe it seems like Linux geeks are underestimating the importance of gaming, but I don't think that's the case. Projects like Wine and Cedega strive to hit a moving target in the dark, just in efforts to bring you folks over... But we'll only ever see mixed results from that.

From my point of view though, gamers may overestimate their own importance to the adoption of Linux at this time. Because gaming will fall to the biggest (desktop) installbase, how is it going to help an OS that is currently running third? All it can really do is solidify the lead of whoever is in first. Right?

And, contrary to the opinion of many gamers, there are throngs of people who never-ever game... or never-ever game on a computer. Judging from the folks I know, it'd be the vast majority. Most folks just use their computers to communicate, to budget, to work, and to just dink around on the web. Those are the folks Ubuntu is going after right now.

Gamers are important, sure. It's a userbase that is a bit more knowledgeable and a bit more experimental, which would make them a good fit for Desktop Linux early-adoption. We'd love to have them. But, unfortunately, they are going to be forever tied to whatever's most popular... and, further, they are not the end-all of computing.

We'll be happy to see all you gamers again once we hit... sayyy 25%-50% installed. See ya then. =)

Re:Gaming Falls to the Winner

[Fred_A]

I don't see the problem with games not running in Linux either.

I reboot in Windows once or twice a week to play and that's that. Others will go play on their playstation or whatever. Same thing. I've been doing it that way for the last ten years.

I don't really see why having to wait a couple minutes to start the games OS is a problem (oooh, I have to play now now now). And it's not as if you can really do anything else while you play on the machine anyway. So being in a bare system that only has games on it isn't problematic either.

And playing the odd game every now and then certainly wouldn't have been enough to keep me in Windows. I actually work with my machine and while I might be odd in that regard, I find it much easier to do so in Linux/Unix than in Windows (beyond even the matters of trust and lock-in). If Microsoft somehow disabled dual booting tomorrow, I'd quit gaming on my computer and take up origami or whatever (or take more photos).

Re:Gaming Falls to the Winner

[turing_m]

I guess it depends on how much of a gaming addict you are. It's a bit of a continuum. If you absolutely MUST play the latest game, you need XP or a console.

There are other people (like me) who can get a fix from a good game and don't tire of playing the same few games over and over again. Before there were computer games, people used to play chess, football, backgammon, cards, etc. A lot of people would play the same thing over and over again, because each time it was different, they enjoyed the competition, and starting a new game every week would mean they would remain forever a n00b.

There is a middle ground between the two, those who like a bit of eye candy or something approximating a modern game in addictiveness and not looking like it came bundled with windows 3.1, but are content to play it over and over and over again (due to multiplayer). Games like Tremulous, Nexuiz, and Wesnoth are there.

If you like the idea of using and becoming part of the userbase of a FOSS operating system, and you can addict yourself to games such as I have just mentioned, then Ubuntu works fine. Installing is as simple as opening synaptic, typing the above, checking a box or two, and clicking "apply".

Re:Gaming Falls to the Winner

[Deliveranc3]

From my point of view though, gamers may overestimate their own importance to the adoption of Linux at this time. Because gaming will fall to the biggest (desktop) installbase, how is it going to help an OS that is currently running third? All it can really do is solidify the lead of whoever is in first. Right?

Actually gamers are some of the most demanding users out there, they run lots of apps that other users don't and spur adoption of technologies, they go for the fastest and best platform and they have enormous influence in terms of buying power of others. Linux has not underestimated their value, many gamers WOULD be developers if they gamed in linux... the popularity of modding means that they'd be contributing to graphics drivers, schedulers, packet Qos Scheduling, the existing modding community, not to mention that A LOT of people learn to code hoping to make games.

These people will never be satisfied with the technology in their systems, and they are finding new and innovative ways to push the envelope all the time... If Linux could harness the energy spent on case mods and overclocking it would be a huge gain in terms of developer power.

Re:Gaming Falls to the Winner

[SanityInAnarchy]

And, contrary to the opinion of many gamers, there are throngs of people who never-ever game... or never-ever game on a computer. Judging from the folks I know, it'd be the vast majority. Most folks just use their computers to communicate, to budget, to work, and to just dink around on the web. Those are the folks Ubuntu is going after right now.

These are the folks Ubuntu has pretty much succeeded in, right now. Or, I'd say, once the machine is set up.

The reason gaming is seen as important is partly because it's just another brick in the wall, but also because it's a really hard problem. The day gamers have as few excuses as office drones is a day we'd see a lot more office drones taking a second look.

Re:Gaming Falls to the Winner

[Anonymous Coward]

I find this not to be true. Only if they're gamers AND are IT techs/sysadmins....if they're aren't...but rather just game enthusiasts...I find them to be quite ignorant. (I'm being polite)

Now if they're IT support, yea, those guys are on the ball with all the tips and tricks. They have a much bigger picture of what's happening on the network front, and when it comes down to what each layer of the OS is doing, they have it down cold.

Most xp gamers are part of the "masses". Most techs/sysadmins that know xp aren't.

you got sheep, and you pros.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Karellen]

"if you manually edited any files (probably /etc/X11/xorg.conf, if you did) then you may want to make a backup copy of them"

You shouldn't need to do this, as dpkg (the program at the heart of the package management/upgrade process) will do it for you. After an upgrade you should see a ".dpkg-old" version of the configuration file alongside the new one. So, for X, inside /etc/X11 you'll have an "xorg.conf" and an "xorg.conf.dpkg-old". You can then just see what the differences are, or use diff(1), or whatever.

Which Vorbis player in US B&M stores?

[tepples]

A Linux distro can never distribute software that requires royalties Yes it can; it's just not a 100% pure Free or 100% pure free distribution.

Lucky for you, there is Ogg Vorbis, which is technically superior to MP3 anyway, in terms of quality per byte. I want to walk into a Best Buy store with cash and walk out with an audio player that plays Vorbis. Which model do you recommend? A lot of people on various wikis swear by Cowon and iRiver, but the Best Buy stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana, don't appear to carry those product lines. They do, on the other hand, carry a full line of MP3, WMA, and AAC players. In fact, the only pocket-size Vorbis player sold in Best Buy is the Nintendo DS Lite with the Games n' Music accessory, which supports Vorbis as part of downloadable DSOrganize software.

Re:Which Vorbis player in US B&M stores?

[the_crowbar]

FYI, BestBuy sells the Insignia line of MP3 players. I have a NS-DV4G. It plays Ogg Vorbis files just fine and syncs with Linux (appears as a flash drive). It has a 2.2" screen and FM radio builtin. It does not have the space of the HD based players, but is cheap enough. I have seen them go for $50 or less on ebay.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Anonymous Coward]

I would add;

tar zcvf OriginalEtc.tar.gz /etc

In case you remember something after....Doing the same with your files and burning a RW DVD would make a good backup.

In my opinion

[sh3l1]

something isn't just as enjoyable if there are extra steps to it. If you have to install codecs to be able to play mp3s, then it isn't as enjoyable for a regular user.

Re:In my opinion

[kaizokuace]

I know! Like in windows I have to hunt for video codecs cuz standard formats in windows suck so everyone uses stuff windows cant legally support out of box. I also have to install all the various drivers individually and the windows installer takes 20 years to fire up each time! Oh and the rebooting! Oi vey! At least I don't have to install an mp3 codec by clicking once when it asks me after trying to open an mp3 file for the first time. Frankly, the only software I want in linux besides 3d studio max, motion builder and adobe suite is winamp(dont make fun of me I like it). Oh also, as for those that complain about stuff working out the box, windows still comes in a box and Ubuntu does not.

Re:In my opinion

[compro01]

you might like XMMS, BMPx, or Audacious as Linux replacements for Winamp.

Re:In my opinion

[kaizokuace]

Thank you, kind sir.

complain

[Anonymous Coward]

Call em up and bitch! Tell them exactly what you are trying to do, point out it is completely legal, and demand better service. bittorrent protocol is *not* illegal, it's just another way to get things off the net. Just keep hammering away at them. Get enough people to do this, eventually they will relent. Buy some stock in the company, go to shareholders meetings and bitch about it. Contact your political rep, bitch about it.

To upgrade from a CD:

[debile]

Upgrading using the alternate CD/DVD Use this method if the system being upgraded is not connected to the Internet. 1. Download and burn the alternate installation CD. 2. Insert it into your CD-ROM drive. 3. A dialog will be displayed offering you the opportunity to upgrade using that CD. 4. Follow the on-screen instructions. If the upgrade dialog is not displayed for any reason, you may also run the following command using Alt+F2: gksu "sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade" Or in Kubuntu run the following command using Alt+F2: kdesu "sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade" http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Betawhat?

[tepples]

>Until Betamax stopped being produced. You do know that Betamax is alive and well, and still used for quality archival purposes in many TV stations around the world Isn't that Betacam, not Betamax?

Re:Betawhat?

[tzot]

My bad. The info I provided was given to me by a technician in a TV station, and it's quite possible he was talking about the media only (which he showed me) and I misunderstood him.

Compiz and Beryl

[yodleboy]

I have beryl installed in feisty and it's working great. should i disable or uninstall prior to upgrading or will the installer see it and disable compiz. just wondering since compiz is enabled by default.

Re:Compiz and Beryl

[Spudds]

As I am upgrading to 7.10 now and took the time to look at the upgrade "details", I feel qualified to answer this :)

compiz packages are completely removed and compiz-fusion packages are installed.
As for Beryl packages, I would presume they are removed as well, yet they might not be removed at all and wouldn't cause I problem if they remain. I had compiz and beryl installed from the repositories at the same time at one point.

Re:Compiz and Beryl

[biquet]

Spudds' presumption was correct. I upgraded last night, and the beryl-* packages were removed automatically.

scanning the mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

My gutsy install is stuck at 82% with it says it's "scanning the mirror". Networking should be functional, the machine was running Dapper previously. Any ideas?

Re:scanning the mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

wait a few hours until the tubes are unclogged from the massive gutsy downloads hitting the mirror servers.

Re:scanning the mirror

[Technician]

My gutsy install is stuck at 82% with it says it's "scanning the mirror". Networking should be functional, the machine was running Dapper previously. Any ideas?

Wait for the smoldering heap that is left of the server to be rebuilt.

Re:Have they made it any easier yet to encrypt you

[computerchimp]

The first link is for an overview of the encrypting the disk for Gutsy, the second is the
page of installation CD links, look for "alternate":

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=873&num=1

http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/

cc

DebTorrent

[Flammon]

Not yet, but coming soon to a distribution near you. http://wiki.debian.org/DebTorrent

Seconded,

[chocolatetrumpet]

*especially* as a home user.

FGLRX users can't suspend

[The Analog Kid]

If you use a laptop with an ATI chipset and the FGLRX module, you can't suspend because there is a problem using SLUB and fglrx, the only alternatives at this time are to use a custom kernel which uses SLAB or not use FGLRX at all. This isn't an issue limited to Ubuntu though as most distros are changing over to SLUB in their new releases.

Rough around the edges?

[KWTm]

I checked the release notes --it looks like there are a few areas where Gutsy is still rather rough around the edges.

For example, what's this about, when you add a new user, suddenly all the old users don't belong to any groups any more, including the administrator group, so that you can't even sudo any more? Compiz conflicts with the "remember currently running apps" feature, so to get around this, the user is advised to just turn off Compiz? If you have an ATI screen, you might be SOL? If you have a Dell Latitude L400, you *are* SOL?

It looks like everyone was scrambling toward a release deadline, and then suddenly when the clock struck midnight, Shuttleworth yelled, "FREEZE!" and everything froze in place, including this pile of component parts that was spilling onto the floor but got frozen in time, suspended in mid-air.

Not taking away from the great accomplishments of the Ubuntu team, and kudos is due especially for the user-friendly way that proprietary software is handled, but since I did not have the urge to download the CVS, betas, and RC's, I think I will similarly wait a while for the rough edges to be smoothed out first.

System upgrade - why not using a torrent?

[Hemi Rodner]

It's very nice to upgrade - when you choose from the menu: System > Administration > Update Manager, it lets you upgrade the entire OS with the click of a button.
But it doesn't download using a BitTorrent, does it? So who's going to pay for all the bandwidth? It freaks me out..

Pretty confusing list of files

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how people consider Ubuntu 'easy' to get into, looking at that list of torrent files. What one do I need? Do I need them all? Do I want the one called "gutsy" or the one called "7.10" or "kubuntu" or "xubuntu"?

Re:Pretty confusing list of files

[glittalogik]

My trolldar is beeping but just in case you're serious, you'd be better off at the official download page, where everything is spelled out in plain English.

Anybody tried this on VIA / UniChrome?

[owlstead]

What happens if you don't have a "supported" graphics card? Can you simply start with VESA without Compiz, and can Compiz be easily disabled? UniChrome support by Linux/Ubuntu is unstable (to say the least).

Re:Anybody tried this on VIA / UniChrome?

[Derek Loev]

I remember hearing that this version of Ubuntu would always put you into a Desktop with the VESA driver if no other drivers worked. I'm stuck with the VESA driver because my ATI Radeon 9200 PCI has never been able to work in Linux for me. FGLRX hasn't helped at all.

Re:Anybody tried this on VIA / UniChrome?

[owlstead]

OK, tried it and now I am stuck on 800x600. The update manager definitely should warn if there are no supported drivers for your configuration. I'll have to reinstall everything again. Hmmm, not good.

Farting Gibbons

[Anonymous Coward]

Huffy Hummingbird? Hapless Hookworm?

Either would be better than Gusty Gibbon -- what's that supposed to be? A gibbon breaking wind as it swings through the trees?

Something to do with hedgehogs would be good next: hedgehogs are cute -- and, apparently, edible if wrapped in clay and baked in a fire, as the gypsies do.

Hapless Hedgehog, Haggard Hedgehog, Hustling Hedgehog, House-husband Hedgehog, Hitch-hiking Hedgehog, Hardcore Hedgehog.

Has no-one else seriously thought about this yet?

[Velorium]

Where's Ballmer? ...DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS! I'll let someone else come up with a witty response as to the where.

TDS Mirror M.I.A. ?

[binaryspiral]

TDS is listed as a mirror for US downloads, but fails to have the latest ISO. Since I'm a customer, I'd love to be able to save them some peering bandwidth and grab it locally but apparently they fail to have it posted.

If they're trying to get it from another mirror - maybe they should grab a torrent like I did. I had the desktop iso in about 15 minutes.

It failed...

[m93]

I've tried to evaluate Ubuntu over the last 3 iterations of the release. It didn't meet my modest needs the first two occasions, and this time, on my Thinkpad, it will not even load up from the LiveCD, it pukes itself trying to load the display adapter. It says "Display server has shut down 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely something bad is going on." No shit.
Nice Try, see you again in six months.

Re:It failed...

[ditoa]

That is a shame. I suggest that you make an account and report this to Ubuntu as a bug. You might find there is a simple work around. If you have an Nvidia or AMD graphics adapter in your laptop that might be causing you some problems due to their driver support so I suggest you run in "safe graphics mode" (second option in the CD boot menu I believe). This is what I had to use on my desktop which has an Nvidia 6800. Once installed I used Envy (http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html) to install the official Nvidia driver and it has been fine ever since (Envy also does AMD drivers).

While Ubuntu is not perfect it is still a superb OS. The new X configuration tool is a very welcome addition and long overdue. It is the "little" things like that which Ubuntu needs to work on over the next few versions. Once running X is always rock solid and fail proof it will be much more accessible to a lot of people. They also need to work on better networking options (such as WiFi) as it is still rather poor IMHO.

Re:It failed...

[fritzk3]

What model Thinkpad do you have? I tried the Release Candidate LiveCD of Gutsy on my T42 and it worked without a problem.

Re:It failed...

[compro01]

sorry to hear that it isn't working, but PLEASE file a bug report on it with all the details you can. it's really hard to fix problems if people don't let the developers know about them.

Emigration guide?

[tepples]

3) Reimplement the required code, distribute only in countries with a more enlightened attitude towards software patents (eg the EU) Do you know of any good online guides to emigration from the United States to the United Kingdom in order to escape United States software patents without having to learn a new language?

Re:Emigration guide?

[meringuoid]

Do you know of any good online guides to emigration from the United States to the United Kingdom in order to escape United States software patents without having to learn a new language?

If you can find an Irish grandparent, and an awful lot of Americans can, then you can get Irish citizenship - you just have to ask for it. Get that and you're an EU citizen and can go and live in any member state.

Horrible fonts !

[Potatomasher]

Can someone tell me why fonts look so horrible on linux ??
God... the pictures on the website make it look like its 10 years old !!

Re:Horrible fonts !

[curecollector]

I installed the package msttcorefonts (somewhere in the stock kubuntu repo's, anyhow), allowing for some of the fonts that MS made open. Granted it's not as optimal as having nice "stock" fonts, but it's definitely cleaned things up for me, esp. in word processors and text-editors.

Re:Horrible fonts !

[An Onerous Coward]

1999 called. It wants its "Linux sux" gripe back.

Bluetooth headsets and old realaudio codec?

[kentavros]

I was impressed with 7.10 beta and was close to making the decision to switch but there are still some issues. I had to do a long search to find a solution to using by bluetooth headset with Skype. I can use it now but I am not sure which solution did it.
I know it's not Ubuntu's problem but a RealPlayer for Linux problem but I can't play streams encoded with an older RealAudio codec. There must be a way to use mplayer or something but still haven't found it.

We are so close - keep it up

Preloaded Microsoft Office

[tepples]

And, ummm...do you get a complete office suite, loads of other apps, etc., free of charge and already installed, etc., with Windoze or OSX? :-) A lot of Windows PCs come with an OEM version of Microsoft Office as part of the preloaded bundle, so it's "free to me" if I buy a PC that comes with such a bundle. And yes, you get "loads of other apps" installed and taking up RAM with most Windows PCs, but some are trialware. Macintosh computers come preloaded with an office suite called iWork, but it's trialware and it doesn't come with FileMaker or any other forms-based database tool to replace Microsoft Access.

Not LTS?

[Torodung]

I thought Gutsy Gibbon was going to be an LTS (long term support) version? Has LTS been bumped up to the next version?

--
Toro

Re:Not LTS?

[ditoa]

LTS was always planned for 8.04. This was announced when 7.04 was released in April.

my girlfriend's opinion of me, in terminal-speak

[seandiggity]

sudo apt-get a-life

Il Postino did not star Kevin Costner

[tepples]

The Postal Movie premiered today. Yay Uwe! The Italian one or the one with Kevin Costner?

Re:Il Postino did not star Kevin Costner

[empaler]

The tasteless one.

Btw, re your sig, wouldn't it be morelike how many seconds?

Re:Il Postino did not star Kevin Costner

[tepples]

Btw, re your sig, wouldn't it be morelike how many seconds? You appear not to be familiar with Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide novels and the Mayan calendar. That's OK, don't panic; just enjoy Ubuntu for the last five years of this iteration of Creation.

Getting VMWare to work in Gutsy

[Ashish Kulkarni]

I upgraded from Feisty a while ago to Gutsy RC, and VMware stopped working for me (no kernel modules present). It's apparently a known issue with the current kernel. Steps that worked for me:

1. Download vmware-package from debian(i386, amd64) and click on downloaded package to install using Gdebi (or use dpkg -i [downloaded file])
2. Download VMware player 2.0.1 (.tar)
3. Open up a terminal window, and type

   make-vmpkg -k -r sudo VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz

4. Install the .deb files generated by the above process (install in this order: vmware-lib, vmware-bin, vmware-kernel-modules, vmware-common, vmware-player).

Re:Getting VMWare to work in Gutsy

[metamatic]

VMware Workstation 6.0.1 worked fine for me in Kubuntu 7.10, with no patches or workarounds required.

Re:Getting VMWare to work in Gutsy

[drachenstern]

pray tell what VMWare product you were using, as I'm using their server* package, and I would like to know if the update is going to bork my install.

* the free one, and I'm using it on my Ubuntu workstation, so yes, I get the idiosyncracies involved in names. but it works for me.

Re:Getting VMWare to work in Gutsy

[itismike]

VMWare Player is broken in Gutsy. Here's the solution I found:

Click on System > Administration > Software Sources > Third-Party Software > Add the line from this post
Click on Applications > Add/Remove... > vm player
Put a checkmark in VMWare Player

The performance seems much faster than before.

One could make the argument...

[Peter Simpson]

...that ownership of the DVD itself grants you the right to view it. "Circumvention" of the protection is necessary to view the content you have already paid for. The actual text of the DMCA reads:

"...`circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner..."

So, when the agent of the copyright owner sells you a DVD, does he also grant you the authority to decrypt it?

Even more interesting is this statement a bit further down:

"OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title."

So, is your right to view content you legally own protected?

It will be interesting to watch the first court case where someone is prosecuted for violating the DMCA by viewing a DVD with an unlicensed viewing device.

Re:One could make the argument...

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the courts would show it to be legal for the end user to view the DVD with DeCSS, but what's not legal is to actually distribute the software to do that.

Re:One could make the argument...

[notamisfit]

Ironically enough, that's about what they have decided anytime DeCSS went up in a court case. Not sure about libdvdcss, since the actual circumvention is done on the end user's machine (DeCSS was made with cracked player codes, libdvdcss "guesses" them at runtime).

Windows Gaming Monopoly

[raw-sewage]

I don't really have a solution. MS seems to have the games all locked up. WINE is making slow inroads but with the arrival of DirectX 10 they are another gen behind.

Emphasis mine. DirectX: isn't that just it, in a nutshell, why gaming on Linux is woefully behind Windows?

My understanding is that DirectX is basically the equivalent of the MS Office file formats, i.e. the vendor lock-in that keeps Linux out. In other words, if games were developed using OpenGL, wouldn't they be much easier to port to Linux? And if they were really well-architected around open APIs, Linux support should almost be trivial.

Re:Windows Gaming Monopoly

[rts008]

Yeah, that's a good point. Dependence on DirectX has been a major stumbling block, but you still have to deal with the graphic card/chip drivers. *ATI-I'm glaring at you!* Historically, also some wireless drivers/support

It gets better all the time. I understand that there are those that instant gratification is not fast enough for them, but:
'As for me, I am looking forward to our new Gutsy Overlords!' (upgrading from Fiesty to Gutsy this weekend)
And I am waiting to see how ATI delivers on their Linux support coming Real Soon!

Ubuntu Slideshow

[bobocopy]

Threw together a little slideshow on Ubuntu and 7.10's features for my co-workers; for Linux newbies; for Slashdotters who can't be bothered to RTFA: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgkpmsdn_60d94jqg Nothing new here; just a compacted version of what's available. Enjoy!

Signal Out of Range

[Anonymous Coward]

LCD monitor still shows "Signal Out of Range" error. Just like the previous versions.

Oh well, toss it in the trash.

And yes, I googled it. The solution is to "edit your xorg.conf". I'm not that motivated.

Windows just works (tm).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

what's next?

[Brandonski]

Is the next release going to be: "Happy Hippo?"

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Ubuntu 6.06...

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Risen888]

if you manually edited any files...

Add fstab to this. I upgraded to the RC last week and it hosed my fstab, nothing would automount and it completely forgot my cd drive existed at all. My roommate upgraded at the same time with no issues whatever. So if you've got a custom fstab, back it up. Otherwise you should be fine.

Right on the money

[empaler]

I think you have identified one of the main problems of "modern" GNU/Linux development. I haven't thought of it that way, really, so thank you for bringing up the point :)

Right now I'm in the market for a media player that can work with all of my OSes (Mac OS X, WinXP, Deb4, Fedora7). That way, I'd be set, both at home and at work.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:100% wireless compatibility for the desktop..

[Technician]

It really sucked to go from Ubuntu 6.x where it sort of worked (it was a real pain to set up WPA, and the connection died every hour), to Ubuntu 7.04 where it didn't work at all. I don't want to bother downloading Gutsy if it's not going to work.

It is not so elegent for a laptop, the the solution for a desktop is to simply use a wireless access point which supports client mode. It opens a bunch of possibilities for alternative hardware. In my antique collection I even have a Windows 95 laptip that I still use. It has no USB (95 never supported it.) I don't use it online, but I do use it for my GPS stuff as that is all 2D graphics at slow update speeds (1 frame per second updates from the GPS) I use that because it has a real RS-232 port. I didn't upgrade the OS because the ancient laptop is maxed out at 72 meg of EDO memory. It is nice to have a wireless connection to print and transfer files with a fileserver. Instead of running a long network cable cross the house, it is a simple matter of plugging into an access point configured as a client. It takes care of all the WPA encryption and everything. Plugging in is the same as plugging in a wired network jack. The same is true for desktop Linux. It's just a matter of plugging it in and it works, encryption and all.

If you are cheap, find an old Linksys router which will run DD-WRT. It supports client mode. Other options include using many of the D-Link access points such as the DWL-2100AP. Once configured it can be used with your Playstation and X-Box as well.

The benefit often not mentioned is if your desktop is in a louse location for wireless reception, the external AP can be located somewhere else within reach of the network cable and power cord. Instead of an antenna buried under the desk, now it can easly be located in the clear on top of the desk or hutch. The included high gain antenna is a plus. Using a PCMCIA self contained card in my laptop in my bedroom nets me 3 wireless SSIDs. With the wireless AP on the dresser, I now see 8 SSIDs. Because of that I often travel with the AP and a router so I can put it in the hotel room window for good reception. I link the router to the AP so my wife and I can use the connection wirelessly in the room with the router doing NAT for us providing a firewall and sharing the connection.

Sigh.

[black hole sun]

Acer laptop: Suspend to ram - broken Sound - an intel HD audio card - I get sound artifacts (snap cackle pop). Display - NOT using fglrx yields a broken X server. I have to boot into safe mode and change xorg.conf. This is all on Gutsy. :( Linux isn't ready for primetime. Certainly not for laptops - and this one is 2 years old mind you.

Re:Sigh.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=575765&highlight=acer+laptop

codecs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/) can play these media files.

Unfortunatelly, because ffmpeg developers did the right thing and said [1] that they don't care about software patents, ffmpeg is boycotted by all US linux distributions. Yeah, go use binary codecs.

[1] http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html

Q:Ubuntu or OpenSuse? A:Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

oPENsUSe?? You mean the operating system from Micro$oftNovell?

Now that's a hard choice. I'd like to also include windoze 95 in the equation...

Perl development environment?

[uuxququex]

For daily Perl development I use Vim. I tried Eclipse (with appropiate plugin) and that was nice in theory except every so often it decided that it wouldn't open my sources anymore. Re-install Eclipse and it worked again. That got old *very* fast. Is there another Perl aware development environment? I'd like syntax highlighting, source tree, keyword/function help and, if possible, jumping from function use to function definition (and/or methods).

Re:Perl development environment?

[Anonymous Coward]

komodo edit http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_edit/

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Dark_MadMax666]

You may need Photoshop, DRM or games, so you use XP.


Games is huge part for my home machine definitely. Also MS Office (and no open office does not cut it when you need it for work). Also development environment ( I prefer use .net for my little home pet projects )

Being legal free is not really a huge factor for me (totally non factor actually).Firefox I dont use because it does work properly with MSDN (at least wasnt last time I checked).

I do not choose software based on philosophy - I choose it from practical stand point. I use tons of freeware ( kmplayer,winamp, free download manager, cdburnerxp pro etc...) when it servers the needs best and use paid/pirated software when it is best.

  And yeah I tried Ubuntu (as well as many other distros) and besides philosophy there are really no points to it imho to use on desktop.

and OS X...

[m2943]

Out of the box, OS X has trouble with many different kinds of media files, including AVI and DivX, and installing them isn't easy. Also, people end up answering a shitload of questions about OS X about upgrading this or that, and users generally end up searching and installing lots of other software by hand.

Ubuntu asks you once whether you want to install MP3 software, and if you agree, it does it. That's all. Overall, it's much simpler and much less work than getting OS X in shape after an install.

Upgrading Kubuntu

[Dani Filth]

Has anyone done the Adept managed upgrade from 7.04? I'm about to try it out.

Re:Upgrading Kubuntu

[3p1ph4ny]

I tried for a while (maybe 10 minutes or so) but it seems that the repo servers have melted, because adept won't talk to them. I'm on the torrent now downloading the CD, which will have all the necessary upgrade files.

Re:Upgrading Kubuntu

[Dani Filth]

Initially, Adept couldn't download the release notes. I had to restart it a few times until it found a server that was responding. I let it run overnight, said OK to a few config file changes when prompted (it even shows you a diff of the files) and let it reboot. When it came back up everything still worked and it's running fine. Great work Canonical and the Kubuntu team!

Re:Upgrading Kubuntu

[3p1ph4ny]

Yeah, I left mine updating last night as well. Everything but the proprietary nvidia drivers (which are borked by every distro upgrade) and compiz (which was borked by the lack of solid drivers) worked just fine.

It's because...

[mutube]

The Update Manager only checks the servers on a once-a-day (or thereabouts) cycle. If the update happened 1 second after your Update Manager checked the server it will not find out for another 24 hours. Added into this is the fact that the updates may take time to propagate to the server you are using. It may be that they stagger notifications to reduce load or that they are holding off the notification altogether while the servers calm down*: now is about the worst time to be trying to download updates to Ubuntu.

( * that's a lot of "maybes" because I don't know. I do know that last time I got the notification about 2 days after release )

While that means that you're not getting Gutsy the second it's released, does that really matter? This is not a security release: any essential updates will already (assuming you installed them) be applied to your Feisty install. As you've noticed if you want to update manually right away (and bugger the servers) you're quite welcome to do that.

On the Gutsy Apps vs. Feisty apps, doing what you suggest would mean either that copies of Feisty would gradually become Gutsy regardless of whether the owner of the system wanted to upgrade, or installing a pre-release version of the OS. Unfortunately this also means the chance of some breakage: that's the choice available. A release is not just some arbitrary point in time - fixes continue (on all packages) right up until that date. A lot of fixes will be worked back into Feisty (bugs for example) but it wouldn't make sense to keep adding features to an old release - that's what Gutsy is: Feisty plus new stuff.

Having said that it perhaps would be nice to be able to upgrade "stable" packages ahead of time / before general release. This would work for other in-release fixes too: some people are more comfortable with breakage than others. It would probably ease transition and bug fixing if things could be rolled out to these people first - but that's a whole bag of complexity for someone to fix.

Re:It's because...

[Doc Ruby]

You're likely right. We'll see tomorrow. I'm not in an urgent rush to upgrade the minute the distro is available - the "early adopter" traffic is bad enough. But a silent notifier might have been silent forever. The notifier doesn't seem to expose any properties that I can set like "check now" or "check every N minutes". So it needs upgrading.

In a sea of noise from people not even understanding the problem I clearly set out, yours was the only reasonable answer. Now I expect to get a flood of snarky "fix it yourself for 8.04" flames from the hapless crowd.

Re:It's because...

[Cairnarvon]

System -> Administration -> Software Sources -> Updates

You can select how often it checks for updates, though by default the options are daily, every two days, weekly, and every two weeks only. There aren't really any updates that are that urgent that you absolutely have to check every two seconds anyway, especially considering the number of users Ubuntu has and the strain that put the servers under.

It might not be the most intuitive place to put this sort of thing, but you could have done some research before you declared the software to be broken.

Re:It's because...

[Doc Ruby]

Yeah, I did ask this "wise" community, which nearly entirely couldn't even figure out that it's the notifier, not the updater, that isn't working well. On the day the distro is released, and my notifier isn't showing, and the release is a Slashdot story, I'd think that just asking a question, then agreeing with the credible answer

Oh, and my notifier still wasn't notifying me, even though the Software Sources polling timer was "Daily", and it had been more than 24h since the new distro was available (and known to my update-mananger). I opened and closed the S-S dialog without any change, but then I opened it again, changed one preference, and on close was warned that the client state needed to be synced with the server. Which took several minutes, and left the dialog frozen, but without any "busy" cursor. So I clicked its window close icon, was warned that it wasn't finished, but couldn't tell whether it was just frozen in a loop, so I closed it anyway. I opened it again, toggled a preference, closed it, was warned the state needed syncing, accepted, waited a minute or so. And then finally got a notifier icon. That's crap software design.

But of course it's my fault, not the software's. Me and maybe several million other people with exactly my problem. With "smart" Ubuntu experts like you, no wonder its in the state its in.

Update

[deimios666]

Ubuntu still has a long way to go. My experience was as follows:
I followed the instructions on site to access the update. No luck so I started the dist upgrade from console (do-update or something like that).
After it downloaded around 900MB of archives it started a setup that lasted 3 hours. After the reboot I had to reconfigure some of the stuff: ndiswrapper for my bcm4318 and ati proprietary drivers. The driver from the restricted modules caused my laptop to freeze with a black screen with red lines. Then came the ugly part. Suspend and hibernate stopeed working. I used uswsusp before since the default suspend never worked anyhow but now not even uswsusp worked. After the reboot for about 2 sessions adept warned me everytime about a new version being available (since I was already running gutsy I presume it was a bug).
After reading up on the forums I finally reverted back to the feisty kernel. This move magically solved all my suspending troubles. I don't really blame ubuntu for a clear cut kernel bug, I'm blaming them for not testing the new kernel and drivers properly. And no I do not have the time or adventure sense to beta test, I just want a system that works.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[pizpot]

To copy files with super user status and not having to use the command line (much) try "sudo nautilus"

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[dpilot]

Next question... I set my daughter up with Feisty to take away to college, but since it was a dual-core machine I used an amd64 install. It took jumping through a few hoops to get flash running. I had to load development tools so I could build nspluginwrapper to run flash. It was all web search, and the only part that Synaptic helped with was the development tools. The rest was on the command line.

Will the update to Gutsy Gibbon break all of this?

In retrospect, I should have set her up with an x86 install.
Will an x86 install still take advantage of dual-core?

Another Option

[olyar]

We went ahead and updated Instalinux to be able to install Gutsy.

First time we've ever added support for a new disto on its release day, which is kind of exciting.

May save some bandwidth for folks to install via this route since all you have to download to get started is the 30MB ISO that it will create. The rest of the bits will be pulled from the mirror at install time, which I presume means a bit less bandwidth use than everyone pulling down DVD images.

Let us know if you are seeing problems...

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Darfeld]

And yeah I tried Ubuntu (as well as many other distros) and besides philosophy there are really no points to it imho to use on desktop.

There is at least a point : it's free. You don't have to pay for it. Don't talk about pirated software, illegal isn't a real option. (well it bloody well is for a lot people, but it doesn't mean it should be a solution.)

Am I in for Nvidia hell again?

[gosand]

I did the upgrade to Feisty, and had to go through hours of Nvidia hell to get my setup to work (dual-head Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440). It was to the point where I tried so many things I don't remember exactly what I had to do to get it to work. Sure, I can save off my xorg.conf file, but I have had it in the past where that didn't work and I had to create a new one. There are lots of guides out there, but that is almost a problem - lots of different things to try, no sure-fire way to get it to work.

I'll upgrade.. when I know I have several hours ahead of me to mess with it if the need arises. Let's hope it doesn't this time. It always seems to be an issue with xorg/nvidia/kernel compatibility that I have to wrestle with.

Re:Am I in for Nvidia hell again?

[renegadesx]

I got nVidia hell in a different way this time. Single head nVidia GeForce FX5200, whenever I play video, the screen randomly blacks out. Using the 'nv' driver there are no issues.

I was going to roll back to an older driver but my new ATi X1950 is on its way. That way I wont have driver hell ever again come 8.04 release ;)

Re:Am I in for Nvidia hell again?

[gosand]

If you rolled back your driver version, would you also have to roll back your kernel? I never really understood the relationship between nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-common, and whatever else is/was required. I just know that I have always had to tinker with my video setup on a new install/upgrade. And Linux has been my primary OS since RedHat 6.0.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gusty Gibbon, the seventh major release of Ubuntu, is the best upgrade we've ever released", said Mark Shuttleworth, "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just free."

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Doctor Crumb]

You certainly have your troll hat on today! Some comparisons with XP:

* plug in a USB memory stick, make some changes, rady to take it out. In Ubuntu, "Safely remove" is one click away in the context menu, and does exactly what you would expect. XP pops up some unintelligble menu of USB root devices and it's 3 clicks until you get to remove it.
* plug in a USB printer. In Ubuntu 7.10, it appears in your printer list automatically. In XP, you have to find the drivers, install the drivers, finish the "new hardware wizard"...
* need more multimedia codecs? In ubuntu, it'll prompt you to install them, then do so. In XP, you have to search the web for them, install some third-party software, repeat until you find some that work.
* want to edit a .doc or a .ppt? In ubuntu, OpenOffice is installed by default. In XP, you have to go buy a retail box of Office 2003/2007/etc.
* install/update/remove thousands of third party applications. In ubuntu, it's all in the package manager, there's a "new updates notifier", and there's no reboot unless you upgrade to the newest version of the OS. In windows, you only get updates for Microsoft products, and those all require a reboot (and upgrading to the latest OS requires $400 and yet more CDs).
* 3d desktop effects - ubuntu 7.10 has 3d desktop effects enabled by default, where your virtual desktops are on a spinning cube, windows can be consumed by flames when you close them, and there's 3 or 4 alternatives to boring old alt-tab. Windows Vista can give you an orthographic view of your windows when you hit alt-tab and that's about it. XP doesn't have such effects(a small percentage of which improve productivity) and it never will.
* migration - Ubuntu can find and import many settings and files from your windows drive during install. XP just barely acknowledges that other OSes exist, and will blow away other partitions unless you've partitioned in a very particular way.

For all purposes other than games, Ubuntu has long since been surpass XP in usability and user friendliness. "Average users" are not doing those things that require XP; average users surf the net, send email, and write word documents.

Torrents don't scale

[/dev/trash]

Why aren't I downloading this ISO at like max speed? I have the firewall open!

Well-meant criticism

[Anonymous Coward]

What about SMB and NFS?

I use and really like Ubuntu, but basic file sharing between computers still doesn't have a GUI method in the "Linux for Human Beings" way. You're right back in Slackware.

And getting NFS to work through any of the firewall GUIs is a major pain in the ass.

The online information is a collection of hacks spread across various distros, kernels, and firewall GUI versions. Nothing is right up to date. And the books? Check out the 900 page Ubuntu Linux Bible. It's a great book, but he does the same cop-out all the books do -- he details the firewall GUIs, he details file sharing config, and he completely skips combining the two.

A major portion of the Ubuntu target-population have two computers, usually desktop + laptop. Canonical really has to crack the home file sharing nut. This has been the last item stopping me from recommending Ubuntu to non-savvy friends that I don't have time to do tech support for.

Which is such a shame because so many of them are fed up with Windows right now. They want to make a jump.

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

That has got to be the best response to a troll ever.

Mirrors?

[kcbanner]

What happened to the tubes? Do the mirrors work at lightspeed, and can they get clogged?

Uh, sure...

[uhlume]

...Except that the Last.fm plugin indexes everything played by the host audio player, including (commercial) audio CDs, without differentiation -- there's nothing in their database to indicate what storage medium the playback was from, let alone whether it was legally obtained. I'm always up for a little healthy paranoia, but this is way beyond ridiculous.

Re:yawn......

[visgoth]

Yeah, such a waste of time that Dell is offering desktop machines with Ubuntu preloaded... cretin.

Jeezuz, People! It's FREE!

[Fantastic Lad]

I think Mark Shuttleworth is one of the few people this world has today who can be looked upon as genuinely heroic.

The man put up his own millions, fought to bring computer technology to the third world, and will mail you a free copy of the Ubuntu CD if you ask.

Yeah, talk about shortcomings and areas where it doesn't work, etc., but for crying out loud! It might be wise to treat it in a tone of constructive criticism rather than bitter complaint. A little respect is due here. Heck, a lot of respect is due here!

And sheesh, I'm not even a regular Linux user. (Not until the Gimp does more than 8 bits and builds a better layout and includes CMYK. And changes its creepy name.)

-FL

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Fallingcow]

AFAIK, dual-core processors show up as just one processor to the OS. Otherwise, you'd have to have an SMP-enabled (Symmetric Multi-Processor) kernel, and I'm not sure that the default Ubuntu one does that. The rule so far seems to be one processor slot=one processor as far as the OS can tell, regardless of the number of cores.

I know that AMD64s and the dual-core variety of the same can be run in x86 mode with minimal slowdown. The only big differences are reduced memory size availability (but you probably don't have enough for it to matter) and slightly slower processing of certain very heavy number-crunching activities, like video encoding and such. I assume that Intel's Core Duos can do the same thing. So yeah, you can do x86. I run x86 Windows XP for gaming on my single-core AMD64, for instance.

As for Flash on Gutsy 64, this thread on the Ubuntu forums makes it sound like you just need to type in one command to get it working now.

Oh, I must add. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

I must add that I was not intending to address the bulk of the Slashdotting public with my previous post. Shame on me for shoddy editing.

-FL

Any downside to 64bit version? Wine?

[guidryp]

In deciding between 64bit/32bit version, is there any downside to the 64 bit version. I notice something mentioned about sticking with 32bit version if you need 32 bit compatibility. Is wine more compatible with the 32 bit version?

Every once in a while (since slackware on floppies) I try Linux, end up disappointed (poor audio support, clunky).

I just got a new computer with Intel Cord Duo and I figure now is a good time to try again...

Re:Any downside to 64bit version? Wine?

[apalsola]

I don't know about 7.10 (yet), but with 64-bit version of 7.04, there is some trouble with proprietary software, e.g. Flash and Java plug-ins for Firefox. You can get around (most of) the trouble but it takes some work. Open source software usually works just fine with the 64-bit software (YMMV). I haven't used Wine, so I don't know which version is better for that.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[dpilot]

That looks like they've put flash and nspluginwrapper into the non-free branch of the regular repository. I had to run a script, which required development tools that weren't installed by default. Not really hard to do, but clearly beyond the Ubuntu target audience.

Comments about the old 7.04

[hswerdfe]

I've been on 7.04 for a while now. and there were a few things about it that I just love...
The one I like the best is when I went to the command line and typed 'sux' for the first time.
it told me sux was not installed but that I could install it by installing some package or another.
That was Nirvana for me with 7.04.
Other then that the sound continues to work when I switch users, the WiFi is now 100% instead of 75% and the new intel video drivers mean the OpenGL stuff actually works.

I hope 7.10 has some equally cool things hidden in it.
p.s. anybody know if 'ionice' is installed by default yet?
It would be a good idea cause Beagle indexes on startup and can really slow down DVD performance.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[bingoathome]

Your sig reminded me . I work on a helpdesk , have done for ever it seems - I often used to say "I am a the Lifeguard in the shallow end of the genetic pool." Now... I let 'em drown.

What about better proxy management?

[boogybren]

It might be out there, but I personally haven't seen it. Ubuntu doesn't have it. I am talking about proxy management. I am behind a proxy at work and I cannot get all applications to respond to the system proxy settings. Not to mention that when I go home for the day, I have to undo all the settings so that I can use my home network.

Are there better options to managing this within linux?

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[snuf23]

As you see, he notes using pirated software. Which kind of negates the free aspect of Linux and shows that he doesn't care about the legal part.

I use different operating systems for different reasons (WinXp, OSX, Ubuntu, RH Enterprise). I've been really impressed with how far Linux has come. Ubuntu could very easily provide everything a lot of users need. Most people I know basically use their home computers for web, email, im, word processing, spreadsheets, light photo editing/management, listening to digital music. Ubuntu can do all that and a lot more.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[maglor_83]

Wasn't too fun typing on my Wii. You can use a USB keyboard with the Internet Channel now.

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody mentions Gimp, but everyone who needs Photoshop - I mean _needs_, not for CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER, not for Fark, not for 4chan, but for actual, boring work - needs CMYK support.

Is there really a Linux alternative? As it is now, Gimp is a Paint.NET alternative.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[rantingkitten]

Actually, whenever I've installed Feisty on a dual-core machine, /proc/cpuinfo declares both cores, considering them two processors. Furthermore, when I use the little graphical system-management thing (system > administration > system monitor) it shows both cores running, and uname -a shows the SMP kernel.

I forget what previous releases did, but Feisty seems to detect dual core systems and use the appropriate kernel very well. The ones I've tried have all been Intel, not AMD, but I doubt that would make a difference, so hopefully he shouldn't be having any problems there.

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[Fallingcow]

Really? So WinXP, which is what most people surely run on these sorts of machines, does SMP?

I didn't know that. Cool.

Has anyone tried...

[jswalter9]

Has anybody tried upgrading from the update manager? I broke an install a couple years ago doing that.

Re:Has anyone tried...

[Grifty]

I tried that - it broke, briefly, locking up and refusing to download/install the rest of the upgrade. I restarted, did a partial upgrade, then the update manager updated/upgraded the rest of the packages later on.

So far, no apparent issues except with the new implementation of compiz-fusion.
Beryl was working fine w/ Emerald as the window manager...
For now, I am just using GDM and have turned off visual effects, window decoration, etc.

Issues include, freezing, windows moving to odd places, and general unresponsiveness, occasionally the title bars disappear altogether (I had this issue before, but now restarting the window manager doesn't work - the GUI freezes entirely and I have to restart X...)

There is no reason for me to expect that the issues with compiz-fusion have anything to do with the upgrade process though.

Re:Has anyone tried...

[jswalter9]

Thanks! I think I'll wait. :)

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Sax Maniac]

Ha, got a great laugh about that XP USB menu. Which of the 7 entires do I click?

I cobbled together a box of junk parts out the company's basement for my 5-year old, and dumped Ubuntu on it. (No, not going to go rabid and force him to use Linux. Having two OSes in the house should make him realizes there's more to life than Windows.) I'm rather shocked how easy it was to install - I've spent 10x the amount of time trying to get a basic Fedora Core going here at work.

But, I'm more impressed on how they slimmed down the desktop. Yeah, to us geeks, the lack of options to control everything is disturbing. But the they've really organized it quite well, and the lack of clutter makes it easy to find the basics. I would go as far to say it's easier to deal with than XP.

I'm seriously thinking of setting my parents up with it. XP breaks every few months and I have to remote admin it to fix whatever crapped out (yay, TightVNC). The main sticking point will be digital camera software, if I can convince them to use whatever replacement there is. They're already used to FireFox and Thunderbird, so most of the battle is won.

64bit is fine

[reaktor]

Wine provides 64bit Ubuntu packages. There is a repo from www.winehq.org. Debian and Ubuntu have a 32bit compatibility layer (roughly speaking) built in. So you can execute any 32bit code as normal. You can install a 32bit Firefox if you desire, and it will not bother the 64bit Firefox. So you can have all 32bit plugins. In a nut shell, there are no issues.

Example of "works on ubuntu, not on windows" too.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

here's one. $16 and the reviews say it works with ubuntu fine.

Plug-and-play on Gutsy Gibbon.

And at least one reviewer says that it doesn't work worth beans on a couple versions of Windows even after he did hunt down and install drivers.

So it's a fine example of hardware with better Linux than Windows support. B-)

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Khaed]

USB Stick: And boy is it annoying in Windows. Especially if you have to tell a non-tech person how to do it.

Codecs: Also, with all that third party software, there's a good chance of getting some sort of nasty, because it's so easy to install spyware in Windows.

As to installing programs: Nothing I've ever used is as cool as Synaptic. Windows isn't even close.

I'll sacrifice games for the security and robustness, plus Synaptic. Also, Gnome and KDE are both prettier than Windows and still feel more responsive.

Enjoy the new release!

[zeromerk]

Due to the overwhelming amount of downloads, it's encouraged that you download using bittorrent. That is... unless you use Comcast! =)

Vista requires hoop-jumping.

[SanityInAnarchy]

And also doesn't support plenty of things, including at least one of Microsoft's own products.

I strongly suspect that in at least a few circumstances, the overhead of Wine's dx10 will be far less than the overhead of Vista.

Very true, but...

[SanityInAnarchy]

There are actually quite a few big-name games that are OpenGL, and even a couple that have native Linux ports.

But making a port is more than just OpenGL. Not much more, technologically, maybe, but it does mean you suddenly have to support people on Linux, and that's going to be the real issue.

But for many people, WoW is the only game. And WoW can run in OpenGL mode, and works very well under Cedega, at least, and very likely under vanilla Wine. (Haven't tried in awhile, though, I don't play WoW.)

The biggest problem, too, is caring. As in, Valve obviously doesn't care -- their Linux support on servers is half-assed, compared to what it could be, but look at Steam. Steam embeds IE. There goes Linux support.

I mean, yes, people have written wrappers to allow Wine to pretend Gecko is IE -- meaning Steam on Linux embeds the Firefox/Mozilla engine instead. But designing for portability, even in a game, really isn't hard.

Not ready yet?

[gblfxt]

I attempted an install on a motherboard with IDE and SATA components. This motherboard had the option to switch boot order of IDE or SATA. When you install 7.10, it assumes IDE comes first and sets up GRUB that way. I happened to have the BIOS set for SATA to come first. While I could edit /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/ to fix this, I'm not sure most typical people could.

RT2500, not so happy, Dell 8600, happy

[AbRASiON]

Well they fixed the video probems from 7.04 but the wifi doesn't work on my RT2500, WPA just isn't happening despite the menu implying it does, what a shame.

Still waiting for a version of this OS to just WORK out of the box for me :/

Komodo?

[uuxququex]

Komodo, why didn't I think about that one? It's free (as in beer) even!

Thanks!

Re:Just do (n00b question)....

[vitulor]

Unfortunately I choose the "upgrade version" option on my kubuntu 7.04 system. I am relatively new to Linux. Needless to say, it broke and was unuseable. I downloaded the full version and luckily I had saved my /home directory, so after installing the new one I was up to par in a couple of hours with a little tweaking. Perhaps a more experienced Linux user would have made out better. I can say the new 7.10 is nice. Everything worked right from the install. The is on an older PIII 800mhz with 484MB RAM. The (k)ubuntu forums are -usually- helpful, but I found nothing of help during the install when confronted with errors. I used a second computer to access the forums, and looked for solutions unsuccessfully. In time, I would imagine they will appear, but I found none yet. If you plan to "upgrade" your 7.04 version, be -sure- you have a copy of your /home/user saved somewhere. At least most of my config files and documents of any importance were saved. Good luck!

Re:Props to Shuttleworth

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad (70) still can't unmount an USB memory stick on Windows. On Ubuntu he managed to figure it out.

One thing he can't do on Ubuntu is install software. Synaptic confuses him because it's so different from the Windows/Mac world. The bewildering number of applications, and brief descriptions are confusing to a newbie. It doesn't really show what the software does, and whether you actually want/need it. He really liked Ubuntu, but wanted to be able to use the latest Illustrator/Photoshop, and try out the latest magazine demo apps.
I finally set him up with Vista (which I quickly learned to loathe). Before that, I showed him how to run Windows XP inside Ubuntu (using VMware), but that seemed to confuse him. Next we're trying dual booting.

Ubuntu is on the up again

[johnsie]

After Breezy and Dapper I thought Edgy and Feisty were pretty crap in comparison. I think Gusty finally has put Ubuntu back on course toward making Linux mainstream on the desktop. The driver management is a huge plus and so is the new display configuration. There's alot of other wee tweaks in thebackground that makes this the best update for a while. I think they just need to fix hardware issues in the next version and make sure big stores like Dixons/Currys/Argos have a few Ubuntu machines on display and Ubuntu will be mainstream in the UK. People are becoming extremely dissatisfied with Vista and we should take advantage of that.

Re:Not easy at all, still can't play MP3

[guidryp]

INstall Kubuntu 7.10 from standard live 7.10 DVD.

Click on MP3 file.

Amorak Launches.

Says MP3 not installed by default would you like to install it. Excellent. Yes. This must be the simple MP3 install I was hearing about. ... It does a too quick to read bit of install activity and tells me to restart Amorak. I do so...

Amorak Launches, it says MP3 support Not installed, would I like to install, errr. Yes... Endless loop, argh here we go again.

Next I head to the net. Find something about looking for restricted packages in add/remove programs. It is not there...

Search some more and find I should do this:

"sudo apt-get install kubuntu-restricted-extras"

Builds some dependency trees then reports:

E: Couldn't find package kubuntu-restricted-extras

So no it is NOT easy. Not remotely easy. This is the third and likely last time I will ever install Linux, my first time was slackware in the 90's from a stack of floppies. Ironic that 10 years later and I am still having problems with sound.

It is still very clunky next to WindowsXp or Solaris.