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What Needs Fixing In Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Infoweek's Fixing Linux: What's Broken And What To Do About It argues that the 17-year-old open-source operating system still has problems. Leading the list is author Serdar Yegulap's complaint that the kernel application binary interfaces are a moving target. He writes: 'The sheer breadth of kernel interfaces means it's entirely possible for something to break in a way that might not even show up in a fairly rigorous code review.' Also on his list of needed fixes are: a consistent configuration system, to enable distribution; native file versioning; audio APIs; and the integration of X11 with apps. Finally, he argues that Linux needs a committee to insure that all GUIs work consistently and integrate better on the back-end with the kernel."
that Linux IS pretty much a mess, it's just that there enough hands around at all times to fix quickly enough whenever something breaks. That's pretty much how it works at the moment and this could be better indeed.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Is more vendor support. Every supposed real problem with Linux is based on or related to a problem with a driver; nine times out of ten this problem is caused by the manufacturer being unwilling or unable to release specifications. The various vendors out there need to realize that Linux may not be the future, but it's a more likely future than Windows, and they need to put some effort into support. Of course, some of them have, and if you reward them by purchasing their hardware, they may do more of it. Regardless, having multiple GUIs isn't actually a real problem - it's an opportunity, not a setback, and meanwhile you can trivially use libqt to draw GTK+ apps or use GTK+ to draw widgets for libqt programs (Sorry I haven't updated in a while, my last build FAILED on the build servers but worked at home, and it was a compiler error, NOT a library I forgot to specify. Nice work, Ubuntu!)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That is not a bug. It's a feature.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
the problem with linux, is that to many people want it to be to many things. there is no centralised effort to get it to do one thing.
there are several GUI solutions, rather than a centralised effort, there are several browsers gunning to be the main browser, there are several sound sub-systems/servers... why cant these people learn to play together, and come up with something that fits everybody.
i know i will get comments about "choice" its all about "choice", but its not, its not at all about choice to the common user... the common user want to switch the computer on, check their hotmail account, check facebook, and then talk to their friends on live messenger... THATS IT.... thats what the common computer user does now... they dont care how their computer does it, they dont care about the morality behind it, they dont care if the guy who made their file system killed his wife or not.. they dont even know what a file system is.
its only the very advanced users who care about these things, and im afraid to say, that these users dont even account for 1% of all computer users.
if linux based operating systems are to become as big as they want to be, they need to stop fighting among themselves and centralised their efforts. otherwise, we will be having this same story in another 17 years
portfolio
My biggest issue lately has been NetworkManager. It isn't absolutely necessary but wireless connections are quite annoying without it and more and more applications are becoming NetworkManager aware which means it is increasingly important to have it. It hasn't progressed that much since its inception and it's still not possible to configure most networking options to work with it. The NetworkManager homepage makes it clear that they are not interested in profiles, and their application makes it clear they are not interested in bridge interfaces or any other kind of advanced networking. So your options are to disable it and configure networking through your init scripts or deal with the extremely limited options of NetworkManager. My biggest complainst are that I cannot get a static IP on my home wireless while getting DHCP everywhere else and it's a real pain in the ass to set up bridged networking for use with a VM.
Time makes more converts than reason
No, a committee should be responsible for setting standards, similar to how the W3C sets standards for the web. Standards are good. Besides, sometimes programmers need to have their ego reigned in and given some direction. ;)
It's a cultural thing. There's a difference between designing a distro for a need (I.E., embedded, desktop, server, special applications) and going gun-ho into creating a new distro organization for nearly every new feature.
That's the problem that I see with all of these niche distros. Many rarely see a user, simply because they're either indistinguishable from their dozen other competing niche variants or their features are already blanket covered by another distro.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
We have the LSB, and distributions which make some effort to ship binary 'compat' packages, so that third parties can distribute their software in RPMv3 format (n.b. not the same format as currently used by RPM-based distros, which are on RPMv4) and it will just install and work on any i386 or x86_64 Linux system. But I wonder if that is slightly the wrong model. At the moment if you want some particular library you have the choice of statically linking it into your executable, or just relying on it being there in the target system; neither is very appealing.
For example, suppose you want GTK version 2.16 or later but LSB specifies an older GTK (actually, it specifies a set of interfaces, but that corresponds to a particular GTK version). You could statically link your app with gtk-2.16, or you could include your own private copy of the library to be stuck in /opt/myapp/libs, but then what about Fedora 10 which does include a new enough GTK?
Instead of providing a single RPM (or worse, lots of different binary RPMs for different distros), we should encourage vendors to set up a yum repository. Then to install their software you could add the third-party's repository to your software sources list and use the normal GUI tools to update and install packages. If they want to use some newer library which is not included in Ye Olde Enterprise Linux 1.1, then they can just add a package for that library to the repository, and it will be installed only on systems that need it. This also takes care of automatic updates, which are not provided if you just give people an RPM file to install manually.
Of course, we don't live in a world where you can just 'encourage' third-party software vendors to do things and they'll jump to it; otherwise Nvidia would long ago have released free drivers. So you need to make it as easy as possible to set up a repository for yum or apt-get or smart or whatever packaging tool distros are using. It needs to be trivially easy. So I would suggest enhancing yum and the other tools to work from a plain directory of rpm files served over http. Just dump the files on a webserver, let Apache serve the directory listing and let yum point to that and Just Work. Or, if that's too dirty for you, use a directory on an ftp site (which at least has a defined protocol for listing the files available).
I think a repository for package management programs like yum satisfies what the author is talking about when he asks for a 'meta-package'.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No, a committee should be responsible for setting standards, similar to how the W3C sets standards for the web.
There is already Linux Standard Base. But what real influence does the LSB Workgroup have in the GNU/Linux ecosystem?
...and none of them are listed in this article. Most of these are lame rehashes of old stuff that just isn't important. How about stuff like flash not crashing on me every two minutes? A IM client that doesn't freeze on file transfers with native MSN clients (I've tried several and they just don't work), some real compatibility with MS Office (the locked excel sheet for travel expenses breaks every time and I have to unlock it to actually make it work), fix the dual screen setup so that it actually works, that the side buttons on my mouse would work without hacking xorg.conf, all the ways WINE fails me and so on. I don't care that there's plenty choices, I just want at least one choice that works...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The thing about Linux is no one can agree on one desktop, which is why there are more than one. Some people like the retardedly simple yet unconfigurable Gnome, some people like the super advanced yet buggy KDE, and some people don't care and use XFCE because it's fast. No matter which one you choose, a lot of people won't be happy, and the beauty of an open source operating system is you can't force them to use one they don't want. And if distributions being so different is a problem, don't tell your grandma to get Linux, tell her to get Fedora, or Ubuntu, or SUSE. Your argument is from the view of someone who doesn't understand the entire point of open source software. Linux users don't want our choices taken away. There are definitely issues they need to work with, like choosing one package format, but getting rid of all choices is not what's going to make Linux better.
USB barely works. It's OK for mass-storage devices, but sucks hugely for high-bandwidth devices, or anything that's removable - and gets removed.
Video: just as bad. Put these two together and you have a mess of non-functional webcams, video applications which sometimes hold together if you're prepared to spend hours and days hunting down just the rtight combination of codecs, libraries and applications.
However, the worst part of Linux is tha parlous state of the documentation. A morass of different styles: .man .info HOWTOs, html, text-files. Almost none is available in more than one language and hardly any is kept up to date. Even less is declared obsolete, to stop people trying techniques that haven't worked in years - but is still highly-linked to on the web.
Frequently, the best documentation for an application is the string command.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I guess these are the main things without wasting too much time on this topic.
... it depends heavily on what the goal is. If the goal is to overtake windows on the desktop, then largely, yes, I agree. However, linux is in good shape on the server, actually far better shape than Windows 2003 Server in reality. It's easier to manage, it's more reliable, it's cheaper, and harder to exploit. However, if linux is going to make a serious attempt at taking over desktop market share from Windows then there are two things that must be done-- simplistic flawless working audio. simplistic flawless working video. It takes many times more effort in linux to get audio and video working cleanly than it does in windows and until that changes there is no hope of linux gaining serious market share in the destop environment. (on the other side of that coin, once it's working in linux it never breaks unlike windows.. and you can simply copy your old configs over your new when you reinstall and everything works again.)
Pantek, Inc. - http://www.pantek.com/ - info@pantek.com
+1-877-LINUX-FIX - Expert Open Source Support
Documentation
Everything else is secondary. Well, most everything. But without usable documentation, all else is futile.
Oh, and would someone do some work on documentation?
Thanks!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The idea that the purpose of Linux, and Open Source in general, is to beat Microsoft has done more damage to the movement than just about anything else. It forces people to think in terms of how to obtain market share rather than how to improve software and advance the cause of free software.
The biggest single advantage of the free software model is the ability to innovate quickly, because there are more people working on it, and those people have more freedom to tinker around without having to worry about being profitable this quarter. However, since the vast majority of people in the movement these days seem to be primarily concerned with copying Microsoft products in order to beat them at their own game, real innovation is being stifled.
The fact that most major Linux distributions come with a default desktop that mimics Windows in many ways is testament to this fact. It's time to face facts: For most people, it's never going to be the year of Linux on the desktop, and that shouldn't be regarded as a failure to anyone. The end goal of free software is not to defeat Microsoft. Free software is a goal in and of itself.
So many people tut and say "Someone should do something", but so few step forward and say "...and that someone is me"
-- Terry Prattchet
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
I wish there was a windows remote desktop equivalent. Yeah! I can forward X11 apps over SSH! Network transparency! Cool! But over the internet - usually painful...high latency? oops. Connection dropped? App exits. Hope it autosaves.
Ok, so let's use VNC. A lot better to be sure. Or NX, with its shockingly awesome speed and responsiveness.
But how do I get at the apps I already have running? Nifty, I can ssh in to my desktop machine at home. I know I'm logged in to a gnome/kde/whatever session. Screen locked. What if I have Eclipse open and want to pick up where I left off? :0, and setting environment variables appropriately)? Oh, look at that! Screen's locked. I'll just type in my password and get going. Works fine, except for the fact that my _monitor woke up_ and _everyone can see what I'm doing or hijack my session_ (keyboard and mouse working). Maybe I'll just quickly logout so I can start something in VNC...
-Start a vncserver? That's fantastic. I just bypassed the display manager, so no warning about concurrent sessions. Let's hope that _all_ of my apps are careful about this weird case and don't barf all over my data.
-Forward just eclipse? Maybe if I kill it first from my shell it won't complain.
-Use x11vnc (hoping my session is on display
It's ugly, all of it.
On the windows side, as most everyone here has seen, a) a session started locally can be connected remotely b) a session started remotely can be connected to remotely c) in either case, a "locked" screen is displayed as appropriate and nobody gets to see a haunted cursor and d) none of this breaks 3D acceleration or video overlays when switching back to local display. It's _incredibly_ useful. This is something you'd expect Linux to be _better_ at, a big selling point of desktop Linux...afraid not.
I tried to pick some brains once about even the simplest hacks - like being able to poll X for display updates when it doesn't have a VT. And from that, I don't get the impression Linux will catch up in this department anytime soon.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
consistent configuration system
What a dope; because we know this has worked so well for windows. The registry is a nightmare on Windows. Linux/Unix does have a consistent model and it is known as text configuration files. It's powerful and can be leveraged on even the slowest of links. One size does not fit all - although I've seen far too many applications use XML for this where it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
native file versioning
Seems Linux is now held to a higher standard. Again, what a dope. Outside of the VMS crowd, I've not seen a huge outpouring of demand for this feature. Having said that, I do believe a versioning FS is in the works and for all I know, some may already be available. Realistically, few people want this and most have no clue what it even means. For the general use case, RC-software already exists to fill this niche. His complaint is empty.
audio APIs
As far as I'm concerned, it's done. Pulseaudio and ALSA are all that you need. If you have more specialized needs, then JACK Audio takes care of you. For the majority of people, Pulseaudio has what you need and is also portable to Windows. Many (most?) distros are already moving or have completed their move to Pulseaudio. As far as I'm concerned, this issue is addressed, save only for migration time for slow adopters.
integration of X11 with apps
This means nothing. What a dope. All GUI applications which communicate with X are integrated.
and integrate better on the back-end with the kernel
Again, what a dope. This means nothing.
In a nutshell, his complaints are silly, meaningless, or have been addressed. As far as I can tell, his only complaint which has any merit is audio API standardization and that has been achieved.
Actually the author is the problem. The title should be "The problems with packaging my proprietary software for Linux Distros and keeping the packages up to date".
The kernel has little or no bearing on the problem. The way he worded the title, he implies that "Linux" (the kernel) is the problem, when in reality the problem is he (and other proprietary software developers) don't have the time to make a package for each distro and keep up with them all.
The reason "open source" sucks for Joe User is that Joe User often wants functionality that is sometimes only available in proprietary software which the distro maintainers are not allowed to distribute and package.
Therefore he has to go out and find the software and figure out how to install it.
It has nothing to do with linux or open source, rather it has everything to do with proprietary licenses and their restrictions on re-distributing the binaries.
If Joe User wants to avoid these issues, he just needs to pay for all of his software and run Windows. If he wants to run free software, along side this proprietary stuff, it's gonna take a little elbow grease. The people with the technical know how to make Joe's life easier, are _not allowed_ to help beyond documenting what needs to be done to make stuff work.
This means poor Joe has to use google and find the info and do it himself, or do without whatever software it is he needs.
FOSS doesn't suck for Joe, the proprietary licensing and distribution restrictions do ;-) The only thing that will fix it is if these people release source for their binaries and/or license the binaries in such a way that the distro maintainers are allowed to build packages that work and distribute them with their distro.
Open source developers and distro maintainers are powerless to fix the situation without more flexible licenses.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Until "Linux people" start recognizing that to the average user, these distinctions are totally irrelevant, it's not going to be a success on the desktop. Maybe you don't care, but if you want users to embrace the OS, the whole system has to work well, not just the kernel.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
There is also the notion that "copying" someone else's work as a target is a good thing to do.
Innovation rarely gets it right first time round. There are few examples of big innovations working well first time out.
The huge number of hands to code Open Source projects does enable fast innovation, but copying should not be seen as an evil thing. I don't think there are too many projects where copying the exact functionallity of Microsoft or Apple products is the aim. I would humbly suggest that copying the good parts and improving the poor parts is what drives innovation in many areas - and that this isn't a bad thing.
Cheers
Duncan
Car anologies are of course famous on slashdot, but I won't do that. I will do instead something radically new. A MOTORcycle anology. Yes, you saw it here first!
What is wrong with motor-cycles.
The list goes on. Any of them can be fixed BUT the moment you do that, you no longer have a motorcycle. You got something else.
Back to linux. The NATURE of linux is that it is free. Not just free as in beer or whatever but free as to what anyone does to it. Anyone can create a distro or a new UI or whatever because that is what it is all about.
Change that and you change the nature of linux and you get... well depending on who does it. A Red Hat or a Windows or an OSX. It might be BASED on linux, but it ain't Linux. Same as OSX ain't BSD. It uses it at its core but it ain't BSD. Similar to how Mandriva ain't Suse.
The suggestions made CAN apply to a distro, even perhaps a collection of distro's but NEVER to Linux.
It ain't just about the name, the author talks about kernel interfaces and X11 as if they are the same thing or indeed got anything to do with each other. They don't.
There are already efforts to standarize Linux distro's making them use the same directory layout.
But to make any such effort to official, that is the way into development hell that Windows and for that matter all gigantic software has become.
Notice that Linux constantly improves, constantly changes. Well those two things go together. Either you get Linux that is a constant moving target or you get MS Windows that doesn't change in years and then breaks everything at once. Oh yeah, remember how Vista was such a dud because all its interfaces changed and none of the drivers work? Well guess what, to fix that, the next windows won't change... so you get a NEW OS in the a couple of years that hasn't improved at all, just a few bug fixes, if you are lucky.
Apple knows this and just threw everything overboard two times already, last time with OSX because sometimes if you want to move on, you just got to break things.
GNU/Linux is what it is because of what it is. Change that and you get something different and that might be to big a price to pay to end up with yet another commitee developed OS. We had those. You can get PLENTY of unixes developed by a single entity. Not a single one of them is a popular as linux. (Oh alright OSX might be more popular but that ruins my argument so I am ignoring it)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The core of the problem is that this entire argument hasn't changed (much less resolved) in oh, about 14 years. Linux at some point looked like it could succeed Windows 98 to become the OS of choice, and then Win2k (and then XP) killed it. That was what, 1998? Just for reference, there was barely a google.stanford.edu then, AltaVista was still the king of the hill, Novel ruled the small server market, and NeXTStep did pretty much everything OS X does today.
The Linux companies (never mind the 'community'; hackers will do what hackers want to, by definition) need to wake up and band together to fix some underlying core issues with the platform: file structure layout, configuration and preferences storage, device support, user management, etc, etc. They are invested way too much in making their *versions* of the platform work as opposed to making the entire platform work, and their versions excel.
Windows users are not used to choice, thus, don't give them any.
WTF? So now I have to give up choice and competition in the OSS field because you want to cater to the lowest common denominator windows user?
If you don't want choice just take Ubuntu. Don't think about it, just take it. It's the most popular distro and it just works, and to make it even better they don't ask you to choose between Gnome and KDE.
But don't take my choices away from me just because you want to have all of yours made for you.
Yup. That's an idea, let's break out of the prison of choice into the bright new freedom of the one true windows dictatorship.
Well, ignoring the false dichotomy and overall tone of this, the prison of choice is, in fact, a prison nonetheless even if the walls are painted the colors I like most. So many here want to see real commercial software delivered to the linux platform, yet are not willing to agree on much of anything. How can we expect commercial software developers to want to target a moving object? How is that realistic or financially solvent?
Free software is nice and fits the needs of some, but a lot of the good software out there that people need is just not available for it.
When the popular distributions can not even agree on a single package manager, this is not something that will change. The LSB is selectively followed at best. Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?
I just spent the last week with my father-in-law who is a sole proprietor of an engineering company out of New Jersey. We talked about computers a lot, since it is a common interest. One of his very first laments was being strapped to Windows on all of his computers because it is a requirement for Solidworks. This is a man who would love to change his OS because he started with and loves *nix, but cannot because of his software requirements. I asked him about using Pro-E, since I know it supports a few different *nixes, and he said that it never worked right on them, and that graphically it was inferior to Windows.
His software needs?
Solidworks
Pro-E
Lightwave
This is true for everyone that works for him as well. A whole office of people that are strapped to Windows because of the software.
We can lament that it is the software makers fault for only producing for one or two OSs, but the reality is a chunk of graphics and engineering software supports OS X just fine. It's not a question whether they would produce it for *nix then, but a question of how we can make linux attractive as a platform.
One way to absolutely make sure that does NOT happen is to keep moving the targets and to keep living in our prison of choice.
I am sorry, but this is not great article. It is the analogue for the subject of linux distros of the article we had yesterday on how someone solved the Knight's Tour problem in python using reduce(lambda x, y: x+y, ...) instead of sum(...).
Free software is not monolithic entity with a single purpose in mind, and never will be. That is why there are so many licenses. Who are you to decide what free software's goal is? Seriously, what makes you think you can tell other people what their motivation for developing software is? If people want to write software to compete with Microsoft, that is their right. Every person involved has a different motivation from the next.
Laying this kind of idealistic thought process on people stresses them out.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Do nothing at all! This isn't a problem, it's a symptom of a healthy open source movement. If anything, be happy that there's so much interest in Linux and open source.
The kernel and tools that constitute a Linux distribution are open and free, and there is nothing you can do, legally or otherwise, to prevent someone from creating another distribution. This is the very essence of open source and the GPL, the thing that gives it (and you) so much power.
And it's not like a lot of these smaller distributions are expecting a huge following. Often they fill needs or particular niches and are usually happy remaining small and focused upon a certain thing. This isn't a competition by any means. You don't win any prize for having the most users of any distribution (RedHat notwithstanding). To think this way is treating Linux as a vehicle to stroke your own ego and is an incorrect attitude.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
Unfortunately, the effort to lure MS Windows users to GNU/Linux results in copying bad features as well. For example, one of the great things about Unix in general is the hierarchical file system. When I want to work on a certain project, I cd into the appropriate directory and fire up a program such as emacs, which then defaults to looking for files in that directory. However, programs that aim at compatibility with MS Windows don't do this. If I start up OpenOffice.org in my project directory and ask it to open a file, it displays the last directory in which it looked, which may be far off in a different corner of the file system. I then have to navigate into my current project's directory one click at a time, without the speed and ease of the command-line.
Making this kind of behavior available as an option for people new to GNU/Linux is fine, but software running on GNU/Linux ought to take advantage of the core features of GNU/Linux. As a long-time (26 year) Unix person, I resent having inferior features of MS Windows imposed on me so as to attract MS Windows users.
Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?
The package format is totally unimportant. Making Redhat use .deb or Ubuntu use .rpm would fix absolutely nothing, since the distributions would still be as incompatible to each other as ever. The problem is the underlying dependency tree not the way in which you package the software, said dependency tree is what makes it impossible to install software outside of that tree (i.e. installing Ubuntu7 deb on Ubuntu8 doesn't work, since the dependency tree is a different one).
To fix this issue you would first need to get rid of the dependencies, but to do that you would need a large enough and stable enough core system on which applications could depend instead, but given how Linux development works its not clear if that is ever going to happen or even desirable.
There are however two things I really miss:
* a standard way to ship or even just build third party software that will work across distributions
* a way to install two different versions of the same piece of software
The first problem is somewhat tackled by things like autopackage and LSB, but it still feels more like multiple layers of ducttape instead of a robust solution. The second problem is a direct consequence of stuffing everything into /usr/bin/, which makes it impossible to have two different versions of the same package, a workaround is of course two just build the software yourself to a different --prefix, but it would be nice if distributions had such a feature build in instead of forcing the user to completly bypass anything the distribution provides.
Actually, it's past that stage of communism. It's more like the communist ideal: all forms of control abolished, people contribute out of good will and the sense of reward they get.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
It would be foolish to say Ubuntu is seriously competing for Red Hat's userbase.
It would be foolish to say they aren't in competition. They are in competition for users, for developers, and for overall mindshare.
A distro without developers dies. A distro without users loses developers. A distro without mindshare loses both users and developers.
You don't get a more classic example of the free market than open source development. It is totally darwinian, if its fit for purpose and accessible, people find it and it lives. If not, it dies and becomes extinct - except for the sourceforge search results.
In other words, all distros compete for resources, and if they fail, they die?
The problem with this whole argument is that there's no such thing as a free market, and there's no such thing as a completely communist system, nor no such thing as a system with no communism whatsoever, so every side has something they can latch onto to make their case.
Linux is communism in that it's a community effort. Linux is centrally planned in that Linus is the master of all things kernel, and distros all have a central planning body of some sort. Linux is 'free market' in that there are various distros all competing with one another. Linux is capitalism in that anyone is free to enter the marketplace and try to make money off of Linux. Linux is socialism in that everyone involved 'owns' Linux.
Just about the only things Linux isn't (at least, not very much), are things that are dictatorial. Linux isn't terribly feudal, or monarchial, or despotic. This is because there's no real way to 'force' any of those systems, and all of those systems depend on force to get to full steam.
There is a major problem in Ubuntu which the Ubuntu community seem unable to comprehend. n the Screen Resolution dialog in Ubuntu 7.10 it was possible to change what type of monitor you are using if X.org was unable to properly detect you're hardware. This functionality was removed from Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10 and Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE4. The Ubuntu community seem completely unable to comprehend why this is a problem, however users who try Ubuntu and install the drivers for their video cards find themselves locked in at a resolution of 640x480 with no clear way of fixing the problem. In 7.10 it was as simple as opening the Screen Resolution dialog and changing what monitor you have, but now that functionality is gone. This is a big problem that can put off new users from ever giving Ubuntu or Linux in general any serious consideration and that is unacceptable.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home