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Ubuntu 9.04 RC Released
Mohamed Zaian writes "The Ubuntu team has released the release candidate for Ubuntu 9.04; 'The Ubuntu team is happy to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. This is their latest result, the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features.' The various other Ubuntu-derived distributions, like Kubuntu, have also had their RCs released."
I'm in the mood to get reckless and use experimental software to handle my upgrade. I know I'm not the only one using apt-p2p tonight!
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6058308
I upgraded a while ago to Fedora Core 10, running KDE with the HW accelerated desktop, Compiz and effects turned on. It almost never ceases to draw a surprise when I'm working while on display and casually turn the whole desktop into a cube, rotate it to a blank side, and put it back down!
It's damned good looking and makes even OSX 10.5 look dated! I use OSX and didn't really notice it until I went to buy a new screen and saw OSX on display.
Windows is about as exciting as watching bread turn green, but even MacOS looked kinda plain compared to my sexy new laptop display!
And I'm talking about simple looks, here. To be honest, it still has some stability issues that annoy the ?@?!/ out of me. Fedora 9 was painfully bad - worst distro I've ever used - but 10 is a good step in the right direction. KDE 4.2.x is the best 4 so far but it's still not functionally anywhere near 3.5.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You can actually install the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird which will give you calender functions. I totally agree Evolution suck a$$ and do wish they make Thunderbird de facto standard just like Firefox.
What is really nice about Thunderbird the fact there are Linux and Windows versions which can both read the SAME data files without any kind of conversion. Really slick. I was doing that for awhile until I finally weaned myself off of WinXP for good.
>But then what about not having to use Anti-Virus
on Linux? Speed boost, eh?
Well, antivirus tends to trash the hard disk which is the performance bottleneck of most PCs. Speaking of which, ext4 is rather nice and fast IMO.
>I'm not concerned with look and feel. I just want my computer to run optimally.
Why ubuntu then, you may want to try xubuntu perhaps?
>My CPU is an early Pentium 4 and a recent upgrade to 1.5GB from 512MB of RDRAM.
That should be more than enough for Ubuntu, my aunt has Linux (albeit not Ubuntu, but it shouldn't be much slower) running on a 1.4 Pentium 4 with 640 mb ram and Nvidia GeForce2 440 MMX with basic compiz effects enabled.
>My only other concern is drivers. If I have an
old enough ATI card, will there by some kind of
accelerated driver for it? I'm guessing the
answer to this is going to be use-the-live-cd and
find-out.
Apparently you'll be using open-source ati driver. It has 3d acceleration and it should be enough for compiz. My gf has an old ATI card, with no proprietary driver available. Compiz is a bit slow but still usable.
Mythtv is honestly a bit more complex than a firewall. There's a whole zoo of software running in the average Mythtv setup. In any case, I haven't ever seen my myth segfault. Maybe you have some funny hardware?
X seems to lock up the computer. I just get some weird pixellation. Can't switch to a console window. I'm using an onboard Radeon 690G. it happened a couple versions ago. On the bright side, I learned how to use wpa_supplicant with dhclient to connect to my router from the command line. On the other hand, does nobody realise how annoyingly complicated that is for the average person? on the negative side, still can't get into X. Do they want me to reinstall from scratch? very odd that this happens in an upgrade.
When I go to bed I usually have a dozen untitled kwrite windows with short notes in them, several browsers whose auto-reloading of tabs I don't 100% trust to keep half-typed forum posts and the like (though FF seems better lately), and various programs like korganizer which I've been too lazy to figure out how to schedule to automatically join the system tray at startup. So rebooting is a pain, yes.
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Love the new notification system (NotifyOSD)
I second that. Eclipse can be a mess, downloading and installing it directly is, by far, the best option.
I have a bunch of co-workers using Eclipse and Ubuntu. Nobody even considers using the Ubuntu distributed version. The age of this bug should make it clear how much attention Eclipse gets in Ubuntu https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse/+bug/81900
I was going to say that for Java development you are normally better off by downloading and setting up everything yourself, but I guess that is also true for all other programming languages. At least I did that also when developing with Python.
Actually, for me it was: Windows crashes I try to install it again but Windows fails to activate correctly and I can't use my license key anymore without calling support. That made me return to Linux, I should always be able to use my computer even if I can't get onto the net for a month of two.
Ubuntu being usable as a desktop by default was a strong argument as well.
If you're using KDE (and I can assume you are, since you use KWrite) and you're using 4.x, try using the "notes" plasmoid. The good thing about it is that it remembers your notes, and they're always within easy access. The bad thing is of course that they suck at resizing and moving (is this fixed in 4.2?), and probably aren't as kind to your computers' resources as KWrite. Still, it works without hassle on my 2 year old Sony Vaio, so you should be OK.
If you're really determined though, you can always use ksplice to patch, and avoid rebooting.
One more thing Linux has on Windows.
+1. I'm not sure why so many geeks like to brag about how much electricity they use.
I shut down my PC when I'm not using it. Sometimes I shut it down immediately, but usually at night I listen to some music, and tell the PC to shut down when it's done.
I have a function:
musicshutdowninminutes () {
sleep ${1}m && \
dcop amarok MainApplication-Interface quit;
sleep 15; sudo shutdown -h now
}
which lets Amarok remember the playlist (I'm sure it could be improved).
It also means I don't have to sleep with the noise of a PC in my room. Leaving one on 24/7 presumably sucks more dust inside too, and wears out the fans.
I got an unreadable desktop after the upgrade.
Finally fixed it by changing the anti-aliasing set up in the System Settings/Appearance.
Otherwise looking good....
god n. : the Supreme Being, indistinguishable from a good random number generator.
9.04 doesn't even boot on my laptop (an HP DV2, some kind of SATA driver problem).
Furthermore, I can't figure out where to report this. What's the point of having a beta or an RC if it's difficult for users to give feedback?