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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."
Ubuntu 9.04 Technical Overview
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
Remember, this is "pre-release" software.
:)
Looks like there's lot of good stuff in there though - X.Org 1.6, Gnome 2.26, a kernel based on 2.6.28, ext4 support... (I'm especially interested in wacom hotplug tablet support in a mainstream distro
This won't be the year of the linux desktop- but we'll see how it goes on my laptop
http://www.bistolas.net
I haven't found a very comprehensive list, but I've been using the beta on my Wind for weeks. The focus seems to be mostly on free video drivers, migrating to ext4, and as always, polishing up usability. There's supposed to be some big improvement on boot time, but I haven't really noticed it. Maybe I'll have to reinstall from scratch after the final release to see it.
I want to see an LPIA LiveCD, but all there is is the alternative install. With the alt installer I can't access the USB stick I install from and I can't see my hard disk.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
And that means rebooting.
Erm? Why is a reboot a problem?
Do you run Ubuntu on your server? (In which case, why would you be considering a Release Candidate?)
Or do you never reboot your home PC? (Surely you can afford a scheduled reboot overnight when you're sleeping).
Or are you just after uptime bragging rights? (That's really a bit sad on a home computer that isn't under heavy load)
My pics.
Eclipse 3.2.2 still? When do they plan on upgrading it? I mean they upgraded to PulseAudio and we all know how stable that thing is. *sigh*
I've tried running Eclipse builds from other repositories and seem to always have issues with them. It would be nice if they updated to a later version.
Takes effort to startup the programs that I keep running all the time on it.
Takes more effort to script them so I don't have to spend effort starting them up on every reboot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
So far so good, bootime looks good, speed seems reasonable. No problems with stability to speak of yet.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
FeatureList-> here
Among the features are "cloud computing" and "turn-key" email servers. *groan*. You guys have been saying "linux needs an advertising dept"...well this is what happens.
THL phish sticks
Ubuntu is linux-based, not Windows. We're not used to rebooting all the time.
Every 18 months is not "all the time".
My pics.
Takes effort to startup the programs that I keep running all the time on it.
Your Porn Torrents?
And that means rebooting.
Erm? Why is a reboot a problem?
He was making a 'joke', or humerous implication that as a Linux user, rebooting is both an extremely rare occurrence, and something inconvenient enough to avoid (which it generally is, if you have the option to avoid it).
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
no, they restart automatically.. I mean, hey! I don't have any...........
How we know is more important than what we know.
http://www.gnome-look.org/
http://www.kde-look.org/
no matter what the ubuntu devs choose for the default theme, someone is going to be unhappy and that is why we have whole domains devoted to hosting various shiny things to put on your *nix box to customize to your liking.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Isn't that "beauty lies in the cockles of the beholder" or "beauty lies to the beholder to escape its paralyzing glare"? Oh, eyes of the beholder, that's it.
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 am aware that I will get tones of flak for this...I am ready so go right ahead.
I'll bet you're ready!
After all, you've had plenty of practice trolling linux users haven't you?
My pics.
Takes effort to startup the programs that I keep running all the time on it. Takes more effort to script them so I don't have to spend effort starting them up on every reboot.
How did you ever get Linux on your system in the first place?
My present hypothesis is that your system crashed and the Ubuntu CD was marginally closer to your workstation than the Windows reinstall disk.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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 are just being silly, right? Ubuntu 8.10 has had 5 kernel security updates in the 6 months since its release. Each one requires a reboot to be activated. Keeping a Linux installation secure requires frequent reboots.
I prefer running Linux instead of other operating systems, but I find it disheartening to read silly statements like this. Let Linux stand on its own merits; there is no need to lie on its behalf.
Here's that list in case you're curious:
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-751-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-715-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-679-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-662-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-661-1
Pluses:
Minuses:
The 'Lightning' add-on for Thunderbird lets you subscribe to multiple Google calendars & shows them as a sidebar to Thunderbird's mail window. Not quite the same as having it in Gnome panel, but I thought you might be curious to check it out if you weren't already aware of it.
I've noticed a large improvement in boot times with ext4 on my thinkpad x21 and compaq ev0 n610. The compaq has gone from 2+ minutes to approximately 1 minute, so smiles all round for jaunty from me.
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.
Woe to anyone using an intel video card! Right now we're experiencing random lockups, and performance has generally been subpar for a lot of people. I'm not sure how stable UXA is yet, earlier it was causing a lot of lockups.
>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.
I just upgraded, and I gotta say, it's been pretty painful.
There's also been a million smaller gripes here and there, and this is only after an hour or so. Basically, the user experience could use a major amount of work in my estimation :(
Includes the ext4 file system---having upgraded to ext4, I'm really noticing the performance upgrade.
Be warned that the ext4 implementation in the RC is buggy. See Known Issues. It is expected to be fixed in the final release. So, stay will ext3, and upgrade to ext4 once the final release comes out.
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.
This space intentionally left blank
That's not what it said.
...is expected that a fix for this problem will be made available as a post-release update
Even the final release will be affected by this bug.
Everything worked for me with no tweaking. Drivers, X, wireless, everything!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I've recently installed the 9.04 beta fresh with ext4 and I haven't noticed an improvement in the bootime over 8.10, despite an upgrade from a Pentium D to Q6600.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
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.
The current audio daemon being distributed by Ubuntu is pulseaudio. This has, for the last several releases, been a horrible pain in the ass. After the pain that was esd and artsd, I don't know why anyone decided to try another one. It appears the pulseaudio developers released an unfinished codebase into the world, and managed to get it into ubuntu. So for the last several releases (8.04 and 8.10 at least) audio has been a massive pain. Apps would crash, pulseaudio would crash, sound would not be present or wouldn't mix properly between apps. Flash video was particularly bad at taking down both firefox and pulseaudio. Skype was unusable.
However I must say that with 9.04 the situation is substantially better. (I upgraded to the Jaunty alpha specifically for the pulseaudio updates because 8.10 was unusable for certain combinations of audio-producing apps). I now reliably have music (rhythmbox) occasional browser noises (flash), wine games, video (vlc/miro/mplayer) and system sounds properly mixed with no crashing of the apps or the pulseaudio daemon. The pavucontrol control panel properly displays all the audio-producing apps and lets you individually mute them or control their volume.
A drawback to putting everything in userspace is that if your system becomes loaded or starts to swap, the audio will skip. Fortunately this doesn't cause any apps to crash, but is pretty annoying. It should be possible to eliminate this using real-time priorities, but I haven't investigated that yet. As far as I can tell there's no command line 'renice' program for realtime priorities. (I had one a long time ago, 'setrealtime' but it was a small piece of code I compiled myself)
So the summary is...the situation is better than it has been for several releases (more than a year, at least). But still worse than using the ALSA's built-in software mixing (which runs in kernel mode, I believe, and doesn't skip).
To answer your final question, I believe these daemons intercept calls before they get to the kernel. There is a library which can be LD_PRELOAD'ed which intercepts kernel calls (padsp). But since most apps these days are aware of two or more of {pulse, alsa, oss, esd, arts, jack}, configuring audio is rather a pain. All apps needed to be rewritten to take advantage of pulse. But at this point the important ones have (gnome apps) and some important ones that haven't (wine,skype) work.
The situation is improving, but ubuntu needs to configure realtime priorities for pulse by default, and we need to start killing off legacy sound daemons and interfaces. Linux audio is a mess.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
You can check the changelog of every own project/application if you're looking for specific features. I doubt they would compile an all-inclusive list like that. Besides I doubt you would even read it if they did, considering the size.
I am the lawn!
Even the final release will be affected by this bug.
I checked the page and it says:
When using the ext4 filesystem, accessing large files can trigger a kernel panic and filesystem corruption. The fix for this problem will be included in the final 9.04 release. Users installing from the Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate may wish to avoid this problem by using the default ext3 filesystem and converting it to ext4 after release.
Maybe that page changed meanwhile.
If you're really determined though, you can always use ksplice to patch, and avoid rebooting.
One more thing Linux has on Windows.
I did a clean install of the beta on my Eee 1000 over the weekend and have found the boot performance to be substantially improved.
I just finished my upgrade. Everything seems to be running great, stability is rock solid, no probl
Yeah thats why I tend to keep all my notes in OneNote. *ducks*
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
+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.
Python updated to 2.6.*, I've been waiting for that. Especially the backported Python 3 functionality is interesting; it'll also make porting to 3 easier.
Pulseaudio is still very buggy. It eats my CPU cycles, and I need those for several things, not just Pulseaudio. Removing it takes care of that issue as usual. I'll try again in six months. The same for KDE 4, I'll seriously try it when I don't run into several bugs before the desktop is completely loaded.
The new Nvidia drivers add support for vdpau, which means hardware video decoding for x264, VC-1 and WMV. It'll require you to compile Mplayer from SVN but if you're lucky enough to have a card that supports it, it's well worth it. The only method, that I know of, to run 1080p with decent quality and performance on Linux.
That, and this release actually seems stable. The last several final releases I waited a few weeks before upgrading, it seems that won't be necessary this time. Linux is really turning into a thing, it would appear.
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.
Look in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, there are priority and realtime settings there.
I'm running the Jaunty beta right now, and will probably regress to 8.10 soon because of the ATI drivers. The problem, AFAIK, is that the version of X.org 9.04 is shipping with will only support Catalyst 9.4 (currently in beta for linux). Catalyst 9.4 dropped support for a large number of older chipsets, basically anything earlier than R600, deferring to the always-improving open source ati drivers to support these. The open source driver is wonderful for 2D acceleration. It seems to handle all of the desktop effects with ease. The problem is that it's miles behind the fglrx (proprietary/Catalyst) drivers for 3D support. The reports I was able to scrounge online seem to indicate that open source ati 3D support is a good year away from general availability.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
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?
Instant security updates are a pretty good thing, if ksplice is as good as it sounds, it won't take long for distros to integrate it into their update system. It's not limited to the kernel either so webservers can also be instantly patched with no downtime.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
That was a strange poem...
No sig for the moment.
It looks like it's also necessary to add a line to /etc/security/limits.conf otherwise you still won't be able to grab realtime priority.
Thanks! I'm running real-time now. Now to do something dumb and make it swap...or I'll just wait a couple days until firefox goes over 2GB memory usage. (yes!)
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.