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Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released
LarryBoy writes "Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) alpha 4 was released Friday and Ars Technica has a look at what's new in the latest builds of Hardy Heron. 'Although many of the significant architectural features like PulseAudio and GIO are still in transitional stages and aren't fully functional yet, Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 4 is still very impressive. I'm a big fan of D-Bus and I'm very pleased to see it being adopted throughout the entire desktop stack in core components.'"
PulseAudio works great in Fedora 8. That's not really surprizing as the primary developer is a Red Hat employee (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering ). It's weird the way Ubuntu advocacy pieces rarely mention that most of the software which is touted as being part of the Ubuntu experience is usually programmed by Debian or Red Hat or Novell developers.
You mean PolicyKit? Surely granular user privileges are a good thing in this day and age? It's a D-Bus interface anyway, hardly super weird.
Absit Invidia
The warning to not use alpha releases on production machines is a bit more severe this time. So watch out.
Snipped from the release notes:
Nautilus can behave erratically, especially in trash operations. Refrain from operating on valuable files with this version. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/185756
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
how the hell is this newsworthy? Shouldn't this be off on Distrowatch, or some other relevant website? Goody *buntu is releasing another alpha that will bork my machine... It's Front page news... I mean Congrats for their dev team... but honestly this doesn't belong on slashdot Let alone making it THROUGH the firehose.
I understand why that would frustrate you. My experiences were mixed - it's as stable as always on my desktop with Compiz disabled, but crashes about once a week with Compiz enabled. I enable it anyway - there's just something about people's reaction the first time I close a window and it burns up that makes me more tolerant. :-)
On the other hand, 7.10 is the first version that worked perfectly on my laptop with no tweaking (unless you count clicking on the network control and selecting my local network from the drop-down list). It was literally easier than setting up my daughter's new Vista-based laptop - and Vista was pre-installed. Go figure.
Check your facts, it has been doing this for years.
/Mike
I click on a PDF link in Epiphany and it downloads the PDF and opens it in Evince (or whatever is registered as the primary PDF handler). If the website annoyingly opens a new window to show the PDF in (as if you have the plugin installed), Epy even helpfully closes the empty window for you.
This works for all registered content types, not just PDFs. If on some occasions it does not work, it is because the server is misconfigured and is sending the wrong MIME content type.
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
I suggest you try wifi on Ubuntu 7.10. Don't even install the OS. Just boot the CD and try it from their. (Firefox via a liveCD is somewhat slow, but functional.) Wireless was seamless for me. It just works, to steal a phrase from Apple. It connects to a wireless connection. Click once on the connection icon and get a list of all the wireless networks the computer can detect, including icons for which require a password and bars to show the signal strength. It's fun to hop from network to network. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I prefer Vista, which shipped with my laptop. The wifi thing is and was a total showstopper for me, and rightly so. Ubuntu 7.10 was as behind Vista as RedHat 5.x was behind Win98. Just not ready in comparison. See, I don't want to have to fight with my hardware. I work all day in a unix shell, so it's not like I can't deal with this stuff. I just don't want to. HP, and Microsoft, fixed the issue with the Broadcom wireless driver; BIOS update, driver update. It now works, perfectly. It didn't when I got the machine, so I checked out Ubuntu. I'm way past being political or a bigot or an evangelist. I need to be productive and I need a working system. End of story. I get that with Vista. I didn't with Ubuntu. Vendors support Microsoft first, and that's life. This Broadcom thing will get addressed by Linux, but it's too late (again) for me. I don't care why it didn't/doesn't work, and neither does anyone else. It just doesn't work, and that don't cut it.
Please file a bug report if you haven't already.
(The idea of stepping through the alphabet seems to have started with Edgy, which followed Dapper. Previously it was random: Warty, Hoary, Breezy, Dapper
Yeah, but you're just one guy. If it works for the vast majority, then that *does* cut it. I also object to your comparing pre-installed Vista, with a Ubuntu you set up yourself. Pre-installed Ubuntu is available, and it comes with everything working - I can tell you're shocked. When your only criticism is getting everything working for the first time, you're setting up pre-installed Vista to win the comparison.
To add my experiences with Ubuntu (and being more specific) I had troubles with Ubuntu 6.06 on my T42 ThinkPad trying to use wireless security, although connectivity and WEP worked straight off. Later, Ubuntu 7.10 had a greatly improved NetworkManager. It's everything thing I need. My hat's off to those guys. Even VPN works beautifully through the same interface.
I do hope an open source 11n driver comes out soon. It's really up to which chip vendor wants write one, and it was in this area that I had hopes for the Dell/Ubuntu laptops. If they want to ship 11n, then they'll push someone to support it. You see, your characterization was mistaken. You said:
HP, and Microsoft, fixed the issue with the Broadcom wireless driver
No they didn't. Broadcom fixed it. HP forced them too, and Microsoft did nothing. That's the way it's going to be. Once HP and Dell care, Linux support will be there before the product is shipped.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
How about the fact that mythfontend, stupidly doesn't have a "run-in-window" option. I'd like to watch TV in a small, movable window that I can put in the corner while working/reading. Mythfrontend doesn't do this nicely.
Actually it's pretty complex for a GUI tool to figure out actual disk impact of its operations - it needs to consider
- which volumes are mounted under which mount points (quite easy, but then calculate that for all files transferred, not just root of each transfer)
- which volumes are really LVM2 logical volumes, and how those are mapped to volume groups and then physical volumes (LVM is default in Fedora and maybe also Ubuntu, I always install it explicitly)
- is RAID in use, at level of software RAID (Linux only), fake RAID (hardware assist + Linux) or hardware RAID, and if so are you using RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, etc, and which blocks might be on which disks given different RAID striping models and which disks are in which group. (And once we get ZFS-FUSE to be stable, that has its own version of RAID...)
- is this disk actually mapped at block level onto a network block device (e.g. iSCSI, ATA over Ethernet, etc - or even ElasticDrive which is really an Amazon S3 based storage service)
Given LVM and RAID in particular, I can't see how any GUI tool can figure this out easily - it would really need to poke the kernel to get some hints if you want to do this, or perhaps hint to the kernel 'these 5 operations are a group, please schedule them sequentially if that will improve performance' - still very complex however you do it.
One interesting feature here, to set priorities for I/O between processes although not threads, is 'ionice' - it's available in Ubuntu from repositories and let's you set the priority for I/O of a process - great for disk-bound transfers, e.g. set your K3B disk burning to high priority, or backup process to low. Useful blog posting at http://friedcpu.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/why-arent-you-using-ionice-yet/
Incidentally Vista added I/O priority to Windows, but XP doesn't have it, which is why I need to suspend some processes altogether when they are churning the disk on my Windows laptop.
I would like to see the various GUI system monitor tools make it easy to see how much I/O is going on, like Windows' Process Explorer (from the great Sysinternals team, far better than Task Manager) and to view and change the I/O priority interactively.
Having said all that - I think Nautilus is going to include a Pause transfer feature in next iteration, so you could simply use that to stop something that may be slowing things down.
I've installed PCLinuxOS 2007 as a replacement for Windows XP on my wife's 6 year old laptop some 7 months ago. What shall I say, it's an absolute blessing! Boot times of 30 seconds instead of several minutes, no crashes and - best of all - everything just works, including the wireless PCMCIA card.
My wife couldn't be happier.
And you can rest your mind, PCLinuxOS 2007 doesn't put all users into root. If something requires administrative privileges, it will ask for the root password, which is where I come in, if it happens to my wife.
Anyway, in terms of ease-of-use, PCLOS is still much ahead of Ubuntu. I wouldn't run PCLOS on a server, but on desktop and mobile systems, it's top notch.