Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu Is Hyper-Active At OSCON
ruphus13 writes "Ubuntu and Canonical have been very active at OSCON this year. They showcased a new distro, announced improvements to their code-hosting platform, and made Mark Shuttleworth available for a couple of talks and panel sessions. Quoting: 'Ubuntu Netbook Remix, a complete distribution designed to run on Atom-based Netbook PCs. The main difference that sets it apart from its big brother Hardy Heron is the Ubuntu Mobile Edition (UME) Launcher, a user interface created specifically for use on the teensy screens and keyboards of today's popular ultra-portable computers.' Canonical also announced Version 2.0 of Launchpad, their code-hosting platform. Enhancements include 'a planned API that'll allow third-party applications to authenticate, query and modify data in the massive Launchpad database, without a user needing to manually access the system via a browser.' Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."
they will come...
I think Shuttleworth might be on to something there.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Wake me up when I can actually install it on my HP laptop and have the drivers actually work. I'm pretty disillusioned with Hardy Heron on this one. Ubuntu's supporters have got as bad as Microsoft's "Just wait until the next version, then it'll work..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
At least, not in the markets where linux is competing against it. It's ease of use, and the "it-just-works" factor.
Getting better eye-candy than Apple is no small feat. It is possible, though, but would require a huge shift of development resources and mindset. Everything would need to be re-thought, re-designed, animated, and smoothed... based on a looks-first, features-second methodology.
Think Different. ;)
Vista has better "eye candy" than XP, even arguably better than OSX, but many people aren't switching because it's not just about "candy." It's about user experience, in which animation and soothing visuals play only a part. Simplicity is more important than prettiness, and the ability of the user to know somewhat intuitively what a button will do goes a lot farther than 3D visual effects.
I gave gutsy a try (this was before hardy was out), and was able to run compiz at full tilt on my gimpy macbook's gma gpu.
The problems I had with the system in comparison to mac were:
no graphical sudo out of the box
no incorporation of a global menubar in gnome, eating massive amounts of valuable vertical real estate and subjecting you to those annoying "palettes" many websites use to try to prevent you viewing source.
terrible opengl performance. I can run vlc and mplayer using opengl out on osx, try this on ubuntu and watch the 3 fps mess you get out : /
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I disagree with that last statement of the article. It's not the eye candy that's the clincher. It's the user-friendliness, tightness and seamlessness of integration, consistency across the interface and hardware compatibility.
I have people telling me they want Apple computers, and they have never seen the UI of OS X.
They want Apple computers because of marketing and hype. They are becoming trendy status symbols. (Put the flame-throwers away, I'm not commenting on quality here). Linux doesn't have a marketing department. That is why Linux won't take a sizable chunk out of the desktop market.
People draw comparisons to Firefox and its adoption, but Firefox grew when it adopted a marketing campaign. People seem to forget that.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I love Expose' on the Mac, but that's not what keeps me from investing a lot of time in Linux, lately - and I go as far back as '94: it's ease of software installation.
When Linux, any distro, has a software installation mechanism that's as easy as the Mac's, I'll give it another try. Yes, apt-get is good, but it's not yet in the Mac's "drag-and-drop" league.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
On a 64-bit Hardy boot at the moment that I installed at release. In love with the idea of 64-bit, like three years of support, but besides that, shininess does rank high in why I might switch from several years of Debian testing 32-bit boot even though the parent has its own good qualities.
At the tender age of 3, Shuttleworth was hooked to a machine, just to keep his mouth from spouting junk. At least, that's what Thomas Dolby told me. Anyways, stupid joke aside, this whole eye candy nonsense really has me peeved. What these devices need is *less* eye candy and more clarity. Sorry, but gradient fills all over the place doesn't make something useable or desirable. Have stuff animate all over the place does nothing to make these portable devices more responsive. Putting in realtime shadows/reflections on everything doesn't do anything to give you more battery life. Give me a lightweight OS with a *pleasant* UI that doesn't just focus on eye candy. Make that OS highly responsive and usable, and highly stable. And design it to maximize battery life, interoperability, and highly portable across many architectures.
What I like about Ubuntu is that as a whole, the community takes the biggest problem with a given platform from an end user standpoint, and then provides an open solution that sticks to the common design rules of the software it compliments. The software doesn't stick out, is modular, sticks to standards (or provides a defacto method that tries to emulate already existing standards), and it seems like it could be drop-in software that would work in any distribution.
It's kind of the antithesis of YaST, for example, which seems like you couldn't separate one part from the other, and it also seems like if you use any other tool to mess with the files YaST has touched, then YaST will either have a problem or ignore it and pretend it never existed. (I'm not sure if this has changed, the last time I used SuSE was version 9)
As a user of Ubuntu, it gives me security by making me feel like if the distribution ever became anything users didn't want, they could easily take these parts and fork. Also as a user, it makes me feel like they are trying to develop software that works for the end user primarily and not as a advantage that only this distribution can have to attract users and keep them. One reason why I use OSS is because I don't feel like my data is tied to anything, and I can always use it. Ubuntu makes me feel that way about the software as well. It really is closely rooted to Debian in that way and really I feel it ties Debian together with some sealant in the cracks and some polish as well. Good job everyone and thanks!
Twinstiq, game news
I really would love to try Netbook Remix on my EEE. That has me more interested then I ever was in an OS since the old DOS days.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
yes, wifi almost works. but have you tried using it with wpa2?
My comment to Mark Shuttleworth would be that getting the basics tied down, like consistently functioning audio, are little more important than eye-candy.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
Human beings as a rule does not need to add debug statements to some kernel. Generally the Ubuntu works for the masses, sometimes some user comes along and needs more than the 99% others. Annoying as it might be, he - or she - is going to have to work a bit harder to get his exact wishes satisfied, that's how life is, if you aren't among the millions of drones, be prepared to work harder.
I'm using ume-launcher (the Netbook Remix launcher) on my Eee PC 701 right now, and it really isn't bad at all. It's still quite buggy though:
Apart from that, it's very efficient, and either way it pwns Asus's default Eee launcher: it's prettier, less resource-intensive and more space-efficient.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
You have turned Mark Shuttleworth's sensible idea into an offensive idea.
He is merely saying that Linux needs more work on the user interfaces, so that it can compete with Apple's well-designed products.
Users are sensible to demand that software make things easy for them. Why should every user do more work because programmers wanted to same themselves some work?
Forget the UI, it's usable and that's what matters. What Ubuntu needs now is support from other players in the software market.
Honestly, I'm pretty well convinced at this point that Ubuntu is "ready". I know tons of people that would switch to it if they could. The crux of the problem is that the major applications these people depend on (or at least, are used to using) don't run on it. What Ubuntu needs more than anything is to make deals with the major players in various software markets (graphics, video, gaming, CAD, simulation, RAD languages, etc) to port their applications. I don't know how this could happen, but I'm pretty sure it's necessary for us to see major adoption.
While there obviously are some amazing and great tools that come with Ubuntu, it needs to be possible for someone to use those few applications they need. Companies need to start offering Ubuntu versions of their products. If that happens, it's game, set, match. And I actually think this would be possible: considering how disheartened many people feel about Vista, convincing them to port to another platform in order to reduce their dependency on MS might not be so difficult anymore. People seem to be finally seeing the pattern than dependence on a moving target like Windows can come back to bite them.
I think a few deals in this direction might actually have the potential to push Ubuntu into the mass market.
At least, not in the markets where linux is competing against it. It's ease of use, and the "it-just-works" factor. This was my experience trying out the live cd of Kbuntu 8.04. Everything worked. Audio, wireless, etc. The KDE 4 UI definately has the wow factor going on, at least for me. I am not an everyday user of Linux, but one of my test boxes has PCLinuxOS installed. I chose it because it worked pretty much out of the box and had a nice UI. Kbuntu 8.04 blows it away. I don't go for the eye candy as I didn't upgrade to XP until I couldn't run IE7 and upgraded from 2000, but I am rather infatuated with the KDE 4 look.
Compiz has wobbly windows- i.e. they wiggle a bit when you move a window around. Windows zoom in and out when you open and close them. You can also bend and stretch windows a bit. It's ok, but it's definitely not an incredibly useful feature. It just looks sort of cool.
I played around with some Macs and it's also kind of silly. When you start up some new gadget/widget/(or whatever they call it) there is a ripple effect when the thing starts up. Windows and stuff also zoom in and out when you open and close them. Pretty useless stuff, but hey I guess someone thinks it is cool enough to pay an extra 25% for the hardware.
There is also a bar on the bottom for quickly launching an application. And when you hover your mouse over a pic it swooshes out at you. I could imagine it being cool at first.
As for what Shuttleworth is talking about..I have no idea. I can't tell from the article whether he has any ideas or he is just begging the Open Source community to think up some new eye-candy ideas.
I just used the linux-kernel-source package, which is probably a clone of the Debian kernel, and kernel-package to build it:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5 linux-kernel-source kernel-package fakeroot
fakeroot make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=-custom kernel_image kernel_headers
That's about all you need to know. I didn't get some of the restricted goodies, and had to link the firmware directory from the stock kernel to /lib/firmware/`uname -r`, but it works. That being said, adding debug statements to the kernel is not something human beings usually do.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
When Apple introduces eye-candy, they use it sparingly themselves, and make a great API and developer tools so developers can also use it in their apps.
Linux eye-candy seems to hit a dead end, where all it gets used for is for the original project that developed it to see how many different flashy effects they can make.
The Linux projects need to realize that it is not about the flashy eye-candy itself--it's about providing more capabilities to application developers.
I disagree with you about package management. When I was new to Linux it gave me major headaches, but I like the fact that the package manager makes installing, uninstalling, and updating things easier.
You are right about browsing with flash being hard for novices and I'll also add in that watching dvd's is a PITA for novices as well. Despite what zealots say about how easy it is, I could never picture my mom, dad, or sister figuring out how to get youtube working or figuring out how to watch a DVD. Maybe as more OEM's ship Linux, they will pony up the fees for licenses that will remove these burdens on new users.
The typical engineering geek response is that it's "shiny," "pretty," and just skin deep. But in reality what it is, is consistency, a carefully considered experience that starts with design first - not colours and gradiants, but design elements and human factors - and fit the features to that. Read some Raskin, for example, to understand.
Until the software developers starts respecting designers and stops being a bunch of alpha monkeys talking about what they decided to code up that day for themselves, Apple will continue to lead in this area. And I'm not even an Apple fanboy, but it is the truth.
Shiny, and fast, and cheap, and useful.
And compatible.
Ubuntu (and many other popular distros) have been trying to get there. Last missing part was "Shiny" - Compiz and other similar eye-candies may get them there.
Are you sure that was the last missing part? There's still a problem with getting manufacturers of PC components designed for home use to work wholeheartedly with the Ubuntu community. I don't see penguin logos on boxes, and not everybody has a working printer and enough paper to print out a distribution's hardware compatibility list and carry it into a local computer store.
It's not eye-candy, it's not usability.
It's people thinking they get the best by picking the product that costs more money.
I've experienced a couple of linux-'converts' before, they all basically say the same thing when living with Ubuntu for a couple of days: "What?! You get all this?! For FREE?!?!"
There's just this popular misconception (well, it probably makes sense anywhere else than software) that you have to 'pay to play'. You want a Mac, you pay bigtime. You want Vista, you pay. You want a TV, you pay. You want a hotel-room, you pay. You want a gum-drop, you pay. YOU DON'T GET ANYTHING FOR FREE! And if you do, something MUST be fishy.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
As a developer myself for OS X and Linux, I still prefer Slackware over anything else distribution-wise. Give 12.1 a try; it's not anymore "behind" than any other distribution, it just doesn't depend on a memory hungry framework that some distributions install (package management, settings management(uggh think openSuse) and it comes with gcc by default. it doesn't depend on offline package management, for someone modified apt-get to work with tgzs (slapt-get and swaret). And yes, you can download the kernel source from the ftp, build it, and install it along with the compiled modules without any struggle over dependencies. It's still "Linux", at least the one you are in search of ;).
Also, I want to say that I think Ubuntu can be defined as an OS by itself (that uses the Linux kernel) is if they create a nice X11 interface that defines what Ubuntu is. The main issue between any 2 distributions is that other than the package management and any special apps they include, everything else is the same, and if not there, can be built and added. just for shits and giggles I compiled apt-get, and grabbed a few apps to test out. i also tested out the deb2tgz app that converts it to slackware packages, and I had the default gnome desktop that Ubuntu comes with on a Slackware machine. That's just the easibility of the friendly applications it comes with; if I only want it to look like the default DE that Ubuntu uses, I can put it on anything that runs an X11 server with a decent video card.
Oh well, the reason I am posting these opinions that I have is that I think Ubuntu can really become something other than "another user-friendly Linux distribution" if they design a special DE that truely integrates every piece of code that they run off the GNU based OS that runs off of the Linux kernel. Sort of the same way Apple has OS X running off of and is integrated with the Darwin OS, that runs off of xnu, the mach kernel.
I use ubuntu daily in at least 3 different computers since 6.10.
7.10 was very solid, this one... Is not.
Just look at this massive thread at ubuntuforuns:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=768200
I'll not list all the bugs that I've found because I'm tired of it... And yes, there are people that don't have or didn't notice them (yet).
I'm not abandoning this distro because I like its philosophy. I'm willing to continue my little contribution, but with releases like this, it seems more like a UbuVista or BugBuntu and no eye candy will hide it.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
It worked on 7.04. It worked like a charm on Gentoo. I still have /etc/hibernate copied from Gentoo installation but, of course, you MUST do it other way so my beloved scripts are useless.
For god's sake, I even got this working with restricted ATI/AMD drivers and now I'm limited to power on/power off functionality like TV or dishwasher.
Er, yes, exactly, that would be the "hype" previously referred to.
We run ltsp thin terminals at work. Started off with Debian and ltsp 4.2. When 6.06lts (dapper) we switched and enjoyed the ubuntu goodness. (Dual-heads from an agp and a pci video card, thin client attached printers, snazzy desktop, Jammin 125s for the sales floor). It had its flaws (zombie connections being a biggie) but running 10 clients off of a quad p3-700 was super sweet. We waited eagerly for the next LTS release and installed with utmost haste to a quad xeon 900. Slicker interface (check), zombie connections gone (check), Jammin 125s...white screen of death....thin client attached printers....um no, not any more....Dual head.....not anymore thanks to xrandr. Option to install xinerama instead of xrandr....Are you kidding me? I can kinda of understand Xrandr, but not replacing lpserver is damn near unforgivable.
If I sound bitter, its probably because I am.
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You don't want Linux to be better, you want Linux to be a cheap OSX clone. Go back to your Mac, little AC, and take your absurd package management and your "only works for web, movies, mail and photos" philosophy with you, thank you very much.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
When Shuttleworth is saying that Linux Desktop still needs eye-candy polish to compete with Apple, he's probably referring to Ubuntu per se. A properly configured Compiz Fusion and Emerald (with stuff like shadows and plugins like Group and Tab, Expo) coupled with Screenlets and Avant Window Navigator/Kiba-Dock and proper themes looks almost as good as a Mac if not better. Obviously though, all that stuff is not easy to configure for newcomers, so what *Ubuntu* needs to do in terms of eye-candy is to streamline the process of its configuration.
Linux Desktop in general is *not* trailing behind any other OS, and in fact, it may be leading in terms of special effects. Distributions such as Ubuntu just haven't made it accessible to general public yet.
Well I guess that makes Fedora ritalin.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
OT post here, but I was really disappointed at the quality of Compiz in Kubuntu 8.04. After having seen Beryl with 7.04, I had expected that merging Beryl back into Compiz would produce the best of both worlds. Instead, the result was a klunky effect that looked like someone's homework done only to meet minimum requirements.
For example, the desktop cube is still there with Compiz-fusion, but unlike Beryl, it doesn't have that "springy" feel when I rotate (no, I'm not talking about Wobbly Windows). Beryl used to smoothly shift from "normal desktop" mode into "ooh, look, the windows are now floating and mobile as I rotate the cube!" mode; for example, the top-most window would float upward toward the user. Compiz-fusion doesn't show any response to activation of the "rotate cube" mode, until you start rotating, and then you realize that the windows are floating above a cube the surfaces of which have receded away from the user, except for the topmost window which hasn't moved so you don't even know that it's floating.
Another example: with Beryl, you could use the keyboard to rotate the cube left/right, and also up/down, so that you were looking at the desktop from on top; it was a handy way for me to take a look at all 4 desktops (from the cube's "top view") and figure out where I had placed which windows. With the "new improved" Compiz Fusion, there is no place for me to set any key binding for that command. Besides, it doesn't seem possible to set transparent cube caps, so it's hard to look at Compiz's cube from on top and identify which desktop is which.
Yet another example: in Beryl, a key chord could activate the Expose-like "Scale" feature to let me see all the windows in shrunken mode, and pick one. While the same functionality is available in Compiz-fusion, I have to hold down the key-combo and make sure I don't let go, preventing any one-handed use of the Scale feature.
I could go on, but the point is: why the regression? I find myself wishing I could reinstall Beryl onto Ubuntu 8.04; Beryl was supposedly not as well-integrated with KDE back in 7.04, but the integration with KDE in Kubuntu 8.04 is even more atrocious. (KDE has always been given short shrift bu K/Ubuntu.) Guess I gotta wait for the next version and hope that someone feels up to restoring Beryl/Compiz to its former glory.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
The problem with Compiz or the other stellar desktop environments for Linux is that they don't have the one advantage Apple holds on to: compatibility. Every machine they ship is capable of and pre-configured to look amazing.
When I first heard of Compiz, I freaked out and immediately installed a copy of Linux and configured it. It looks incredibly cool and ran great on my machine.. It makes the system a joy to navigate.
But... I can't survive on Linux, eye-candy or not. X has always seemed slow and clunky to me. I prefer it as a server environment (I have 2 co-located Linux boxes) with Windows as my desktop. It's the exclusive software for Windows that locks me in. Directory Opus and Newsleecher are the two best examples I can come up with.
Disclaimer: I risk to be called a fanboy and marked as a troll...
Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."
That's plain BS, because nobody really need any eye candy at the first place. Integration, unification and standards -- this is what Linux is absolutely missing on its desktop. Apple beats Linux at desktop because of excellent integration of all software, clean standard interface for every software (X11-based stuff are aliens though).
If Linux will continue KDE/Gnome war, they will stay as outsiders on desktop market forever, I think.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm pretty sure the Linux (you really mean Compiz) plugin architecture is a hella more flexible. It's basically, here's a texture and have fun morphing it, give it back when you're done.
So you could install a program to do, well, anything at all. If I understand it right.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Ten years ago, if anyone mentioned "Linux Desktop", the unanimous answer would be "Bah!" Today, in this Slashdot article threads, people are discussing itty-bitty details like "they should improve this", "no, they should improve that before this", etc.
I still don't know when is the year of the Linux Desktop, but I bet that fifty years from now the consensus will be that it was sometime between 2001 and 2007.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And a regular user of Ubuntu daily.
The reason that Ubuntu can be popular is not about Ubuntu, it's about Vista.
Microsoft has a fundamental problem since Ballmer is on: Strategy is more important than technology.
Yes, strategy can be a great weapon. Just like medication can heal your disease. But it also can be poisonous if you overdose.
As I knew, the root of Linux is not about defeating other OS. It is about creating a better OS, thereafter, a better world. It is Microsoft's problem to create a better OS. If Microsoft does, Linux can also be improved since there are better designs.
I take my mobile phone and Google products in the store... What's your excuse ?
I'm cheap. I have an Audiovox 8610 phone on a $7/mo plan. It doesn't appear to have the web. I use the phone primarily to arrange rides and rely on the land line for most everything else.
Package managers are a mixed bag IMHO. On the one hand, if I want a specific Linux program 99% of the time I type "yum install $program" or "apt-get install $program" and whoo hoo! I have $program! The problem comes when I don't exactly what I want, or can't easily figure out which package contains the specific small thing I want (this can be especially tricky with libraries which are often packed into together with non-helpful package names). Then there are the things which have no packages at all, or only packages in whichever manager is inappropriate to your OS. I don't mind compiling from source, but it can be a PITA, and it tends to make the package manager unhappy.
Packages are slightly more difficult to install (though not much, you can pretty much put the apps anywhere) but I always find it easier to know exactly what I'm getting. Unless I'm using Fink, which is just a package manager anyway of course.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I wish getting Vista to play all of my random media files was so easy.
Not all of it is "obscure Linux stuff either".
Simple stuff like DVD VOB files confuse it (Vista).
Ubuntu STOMPS all over Windows at this kind of stuff.
I should burn a disk and see what happens to the Macs at the apple store...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...I still prefer Slackware over anything else distribution-wise.
Me too.
Oh wait, I'm supposed to say something besides that.
With Slack one can still d/l and compile just a new kernel and IIRC with the installer you still get to choose whether or not to install the typical dev software all the way to picking and choosing every individual program, it hasn't changed much at all in these regards from 10+ years ago. I've done kernel updates only quite a few times on my laptop, but there's still an issue with kernel support for the buggy ACPI on it. On my primary machine I'm not so worried about keeping up with kernel upgrades as I am with it being stable and having only what is needed in the kernel. And I still install most of my software from source rather than using a package manager.
One thing that always bothered me about RedHat (along with some other distros) was how it obfuscated certain config files in attempts at making things more 'user-friendly' with their own interfaces, scripts and associated config files adding an unecessary, IMO, layer of abstraction to the standard config files. Modifying a standard file and then using the whatever-configurator utility to change some other setting often resulted in the direct change originally made being overwritten. I know this behavior can be found all over the place, not just in RedHat and not just WRT to Linux system related settings but in some cases it can be just unbelievably annoying.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
Please tell me how. I have been looking for the settings under the Advanced Compiz Settings Manager.
In particular: how to get the cube caps transparent (setting opacity to zero under Utility > Cube Caps > Appearance > Cube Top Color does not work), how to get the key binding for rotating the cube so that the top faces the user (there is no such binding available under Desktop > Rotate Cube > Bindings, although there are bindings for Rotate Left and Rotate Right), and how to make it so that when I press the Initiate Window Picker key (under Window Management > Scale > Bindings > Initiate Window Picker), I can let go of the key without disengaging the Window Picker and reverting to the normal screen.
Any help would be much appreciated; otherwise, I haven't really received any significant information from you.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Eye-candy does not make Apple popular. Yes, their products are attractive, but form most often follows function. Some examples. Mac OS X window drop-shadows add subtle contrast the mostly monochromatic environment. Transparent terminals allow more efficient screen usage (stacking them over documentation for example). Compared to Vista, OS X is simplistic looking. Therefore, Vista must be wildly popular for all its visual appeal.
Technically if a user has enabled the D-Bus Compiz plugin any application can connect to the D-Bus desktop-integration system and start telling the eye-candy what to do. Nobody really writes code for that mostly because it doesn't come standard and no fall-back exists when the user doesn't have Compiz installed.
Here is the only video of OSCON 2008 I could find.
It's a shame really since I myself would never be able to go to the US to one so I wished they'd put more stuff up.
If anyone finds any more videos please reply.
What version of Ubuntu are you using?
I may need to re-check the name I was using to download the kernel source. I may have been trying from work, in which case download would have been an issue. In any case I knew nothing about fakeroot, nor the list of packages I needed. A pseudo-package called kernel-builder would have been nice instead of having to know exact dependencies.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Hit reply too quickly.
That being said, adding debug statements to the kernel is not something human beings usually do.
Strongly disagree with that. Linux Hackers aren't gods, and they're not trolls. They're another kind of very human user. A very important kind, even if they're in the minority. Without them there would be no open source *nix clones. Putting people off learning about the kernel is not a good idea.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Thanks,
I really ought to do what you say and try out Slackware again. It was my first distro and I had a fondness for it. At one point it was well behind everything else though and I needed Redhat and RPM to get things done, so I switched. I'll have to look up my old friend again.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
without undue hassle and was initially very impressed. He ended up having problems with wireless network card drivers, but before then he discovered the compiz window/eye-candy manager and the whole cube desktop thing, as well as dual monitor and window tiling features. He......who to my knowledge has never even written a Hello World program (though he ha......seen Macs, and though he's impressed, the price is off putting. Anyway he is now using Vista, and has found its visual effects fairly pleasing. But, he still wants to go back to Ubuntu, due in no small part to the compiz cube, which he considers superior. In fact, even his girlfriend actually prefers Ubuntu. ...... wide appeal of Hardy.
In short, I remain shocked, bewildered and pleasantly bemused ..... It is not an exaggeration to state that Aunt Tillie can use and actually enjoy Ubuntu Hardy, as though as it might be for us to accept it.
================
Bullshit.
Tell Aunt Tillie THAT.
I have been running dual and TRIPLE screens on XP and Vista.
So far all I can get with Ubuntub 8.04 is a "cloned" screen on my Celeron Laptop.
I'm currently booted from Vista now, as it offers me an expanded desktop over two screens, which Ubuntu cannot seem to do.
And don't ask me (OR your revered Aunt Tillie) to do a "sudo apt gibberish -fyou" to possibly solve this problem.
Oh yeah- my Atheros wifi still doesn't work with Hardyharhar Heron, not to mention 7.10 Warty wotever...
Don't reply to me here. Take it up with your Aunt Tillie.
.
.
- aqk
F U
making cube caps transparent is under cube transparency in the Desktop Cube plugin. By setting the cube transparency during mouse rotation it deals with the cube caps transparency as well.
Debian FTW
I guess this is going no-where, since it's an AC comment, but:
* Demonstrate a Ubunut machine running side by side
Easy enough, although comparatively expensive to bring the Mac in.
* No idiotic package management
What's idiotic about installing an app and having it install everything you need for you?
* Apps can be installed by simply dragging them anywhere in the file system
Depending on how they're distributed, you can do that anyway (with one minor extra step of "extract from archive"). That's how I installed Firefox, Thunderbird and Eclipse (amongst others) on my machine. If someone really wanted to then they could potentially get around that and bundle it as a .bin file.
At the end of the day it seems like a bad idea, though, because a) it lets you install arbitrary junk that could be dangerous and b) you either have dependency issues that you have to resolve yourself or you end up bundling all of the dependencies in every individual package (which as well as making downloads much larger than necessary means potential licensing issues and potential out of date frameworks)
* Apps can be just dragged to the trash when no longer needed
See above.
* A bundle type system for application resources
Huh?
* Perform the most common actions Apple's target demographic performs everyday: checking/writing Mail, webbrowsing with flash, etc., importing photos
That'd be Thunderbird/KMail/Evolution, Firefox/Konqueror/Opera, F-Spot/DigiKam, amongst others then. Flash is a touch more awkward (unless your distro bundles SWF-dec), but then a Windows machine doesn't exactly have a smooth ride with it pre-installed either, and I don't think Mac does.
* Same level of fonts and font selection
Linux supports TTF, so as long as you pay the license then you're fine there.
* Same level of UI widget layout spacing across every single item of every single application demoed
If you're using the same toolkits, you should get that. Failing that it's the application developer's fault, just the same as it was Apple's fault for (at one time) having the possibility of about four different UI themes at once on different windows.
* Remove every single thing in Ubunut that has absolutely nothing to do with photos, mail, webbrowsing, movies
That'd be a re-spin. Perfectly possible, but no-one has yet bothered to do it. Try doing that, and making a media spin (like Studio 64) and a gaming spin and an educational spin and numerous religious spins and the rest with Mac.
* Come up with an equally compelling and easy to say/remember/talk about names for a drop in replacement for iPhoto, iMovie etc
That's just marketing. "F-Spot" for photo management isn't exactly hard, and neither is Totem for video or Exaile/Banshee for music. They're not the same "generic with a single character prefix", but that's because open source projects don't want to try to trademark a concept that covers all of the alternatives.
Besides, most Gnome distros now label your menu items by purpose (e.g. "Web Browser" or "Email Client" or "Messaging Client" instead).
* One to one feature completeness with iPhoto,iMovie etc with every single operation taking as many or less steps to accomplish
What about additional features that they don't have? The core functionality is probably already there (how many things can you do in a photo manager? F-Spot already manages, tags, shows a timeline, and does basic editing) and any extra ones probably don't have much demand. Software doesn't have to be feature-for-feature matching to compete.
* Not a single instance or case of having to edit X config or other types of files no matter what the hell goes wrong with the system
Bullet-proof X is designed to solve "X fails and shows command line" and "config doesn't work so X won't start" by auto-configuring and falling back to generic defaults.
* No freezing or other UI glitches when apps are busy computing like Linux apps do now
Apple provides Applications that do one thing: the thing that Apple thinks is best.
Sure, there's a ton of fanboys here that love Apple because it's Unix and not Microsoft, but the vast majority of Mac users know didly-squat about computers. What they do know is Apple's way of doing things.
Linux has all the capabilities in the world, including compiling most everything yourself or only using completely free applications - but for the far majority of users, there's no need to do this.
They want something that's easy and intuitive to use, and something that doesn't require technical knowledge.
BTW, I'm writing this from a computer running Vista. Never had a problem....
Aunt Tillie has a three-screen setup?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I can't even find those comments, I can just see some comments about adopting a few tiny ideas from OS X.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Not only am I against this for many technical and usability reasons.
I have seen what Mac users do with this package management. They go down to a Apple store, plug in their iPod, drag and drop the applications they want to steal on to the iPod and walk off with the iPod containing illegal copies of the software.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Actually, all those effects are very informative for user who does not have "first level" information like those who has worked long times with computers. Like the wobling effect, you can control how much you "feel" the mouse when you move the window, make the window very hoppy and you notice you use your mouse hand very different way than when you make window very "sloppy" so you need to use more "force" on your arm to move the window.
Animations are informative unless those are made just for eye candy, example, if you put effect "explode" when closing window (only) and then "fade" effect to menu and other closing, you notice the difference. Then if you change window opening to "dream" and menu and other opening effect to "fade" too, you notice right away the difference when window is opening and closing.
Then you can do it wrong, just place "explode" to everything (windows, menus others) so what ever happens (get opened/closed, moved, resized etc), same effect comes up. Now you are tottally saturated with eye-candy what does not tell you anything more than "something just happend" and most of time, it just distrubrs normal user.
With correctly used, all the effects what compiz-fusion and Kwin offers, are very powerfull and informative. But if the way how they are used is wrong, they make more harm than good.
There is no "non eye-candy" and "eye-candy", black'n'whiteness. It is always about situation, how the effects have done and how they are used.
Seems to be so that all the videos on youtube about compiz-fusion, is configures mostly and almost to be pure "eye candy". 15 years old kid who laughs how the window explose away when get closed.
3D effects can be think as sound effects. No sound effects, you need to see what is happening, with small/low sound voice when every different action is with different effect (closed, maximised, opened, crashed etc), you dont need to see anymore, you understand what has happend when you hear. But if you change that small/low sound effect to something different, example of 30s heavy metal when window gets opened and 5min Ave Maria when application crash, everyone gets grazy expect the deaf.
Smallest effects are that when you press button, it get pressed and it change littlebit look or gives somekind respond to you. Or when you move the window, it shows at least a retancle what size and where you are moving it, if not the window itself is moved. All those small things are effects what helps to interact with the computer.
No one is not forced to use just those, those can be expand for more informative versions, 3D effects, and they stay very informative until, they are done/used wrong way, then they start spreading noise among information and usage level drops to same level than there would be zero (0) effects at all.
Please help me! I've removed my eyeballs and scrubbed my sockets out with steel wool, but the images won't go away! They won't go away!!
*fetal position*
*sob*
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
As with an earlier post, that's probably app-specific. I'm sure any developer could (if they wanted) write a new app for OS X and it wouldn't necessarily support copy and paste of everything.
Actually, that would be very difficult, unless you were writing it for X11 on OS X.
If you're using text fields from either of the 2 official OS X APIs (Carbon and Cocoa), you automatically get copy and paste support. You have to deliberately use something nonstandard and unsupported to break it.
On Linux, there are multiple different pasteboard implementations that aren't always cross-compatible. Sometimes I can copy from Application X and paste into Application Y, but not from Y to X. Other times they just won't talk to each other at all. This is, so far as I can tell, due to the highly modular nature of Linux and the often fragmented nature of OSS: there is no one pasteboard implementation, or even one pasteboard API that can be implemented by different libraries, that all apps can count on having available to them on all Linux systems.
And thus does the vast array of choices that Linux offers become a liability. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux—but I'm a programmer, and a sysadmin, and I'm fully capable of using it and dealing with its shortcomings in the user experience area. Many people aren't.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
...there was a useful way to list and search 100% working systems / components. More the former than the latter for laypeople.
The information is already out there, in forums or linux hardware databases, but it still takes hours to sort through. Most people do not have the patience for that. It needs to be as easy as entering "HP foo42bbq" model number and get a green, yellow, or red light. "Yes, totally works, buy it", "All but power management" (or ONE non working, non critical component, two is too many), or "NO - don't buy, not ready yet". Actually, maybe get rid of the yellow, no sense listing half assed systems, maybe require user registration to see partially working systems, so people can fix, tinker, whatever.
The format of any compatibility matrices I have seen suck. Not friendly at all. The public does not have patience for much more than entering one search term. Model number, sku, whatever. We could see a major boom just by making a 'yea' or 'nay' list based on the Sunday fliers for the popular brick and mortar electronic superstores.
So true, tepples, compatibility is the problem. Make it easy to find the models that vendors (knowingly or unknowingly) put together that are compatible.
|plastic....or gasoline?|
> Mark Shuttleworth went on to state that Linux's market share will grow when it has better eye-candy than Apple's."
Sad but true...
Beyond that, we need more open source drivers, and if a distro bundled all of them so installation was painless, more users would glom on.
As it is life is challenging for regular people if they need to go find proprietary drivers, and it's challenging for distro maintainers since they don't want to taint their distro or violate distribution requirements.
Hardware manufacturers should either become OS neutral, or open the specs and leave drivers to other people. That would really level the playing field for users, who also happen to be keeping the hardware mfgrs in business.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
I'd rather X11 crashes to CLI than the whole system like with OS X. "No matter what the hell goes wrong"? that just pure and simple ass-helmet trolling.
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
Eye candy is the least of my friend's problems, who, after having just purchased a new Dell Laptop with Ubuntu he updated to Ubuntu 8 his sound is broken, all the way from the kernel to gstreamer. It'd be nice if he had wobbly windows to console him now that he can't play music or videos, but unfortunately compiz is unsupported by his video driver. Ubuntu, I had such high hopes for you :( But in the end, all that money and publicity, you are *worse* than Debian.
Yeah! And then Apple should do the same thing! What's this "TextEdit" thing doing on my disk, and what are those "Activity Monitor", "Disk Utility", "Directory Utility", "Console", "Network Utility", "Terminal", etc. things doing there?
If you mean that a default installation of Ubuntu could be smaller than than it is, perhaps. Pretending that OS X has had everything removed from it "that has absolutely nothing to do with photos, mail, webbrowsing, movies" is, however, nonsense. Yeah, some of it's hidden in /Applications/Utilities, but it's still there....
What about them? They exist in Ubuntu; presumably you think they should be better in some way.
Having used openSUSE 11 for a while now, zypper is extremely faster than old versions. All .rpm packages use LZMA compression which is faster, dependency resolution is faster and better, etc.
zypper works just as well as apt-get as far as I can tell these days. I honestly wouldn't place one above the other.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ubuntu's implementation of the eye-candy has been pretty reserved overall.
You can add configuration tools to take full advantage if you want, but the defaults work rather well and don't "hit you over the head" for the most part.