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Canonical Bringing an Instant-On Ubuntu
Today at the Ubuntu Developers Summit, Mark Shuttleworth presented a few upcoming Ubuntu projects, including "Light" versions of the operating system for "both netbook and desktop, that are optimized for dual-boot scenarios." Shuttleworth also took the wraps off Unity, a new lightweight interface that will be included in Ubuntu Light and eventually in Ubuntu Netbook Edition as well. "First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications. That frees up vertical space for web content, at the cost of horizontal space, which is cheaper in a widescreen world. ... Second, we'll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly. With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, we can afford to be more generous with the icon size there. ... Third, we will make the top panel smarter." Ars got a chance to try out a prototype of Unity, saying, "Its unique visual style melds beautifully with Ubuntu's new default theme and its underlying interaction model seems compelling and well-suited for small screens."
I'm not sure how I'd like this in action, but I'm glad that they're at least trying a somewhat new direction with the 'Unity' interface, rather than the typical scenario of playing catchup with Windows and OS X that the open-source desktops seem to usually do. Even if it doesn't work out, at least it should hopefully encourage further innovation and something to actually set Linux, or specifically Ubuntu, apart from the crowd. The whole "free alternative to..." approach really hasn't been a selling point since the battle for the server room against the commercial Unix vendors 10+ years ago.
This is a joke, right? Instant-on is mentioned about 15 times throughout the article.
When I saw the screenshots for Unity I was amazed. Finally defaults that make sense. I'm not a fan of dark themes, but that's easily changed. (e.g., in Lucid, switch from Ambience to Radiance.) There's no reason Unity should be limited to netbooks at all. In a world where widescreen monitors are commonplace, vertical space is always at a premium.
But Unity does more than fix the vertical spacing issue, it brings Ubuntu's default's into the 21st century with task management as well. Even Windows has moved on from it's old school taskbar into something resembling the Dock from OSX. Unity's dock is a step in the right direction and placing it on the left is a smart choice.
Unity should be what all Ubuntu versions ship with. Not just netbooks.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I guess I did...so in that case I will wait for the "real thing"...that is Chromium from Google.
Widescreen monitors waste tons of horizontal space and suffer a real lack of vertical space.
I say move both tool bars to the sides. If gnome panel would rotate the words and icons I would already do this.
"First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications."
That's where I keep my Cairo dock, you insensitive clods. :(
Recently I was visiting a friend who use to work at Apple in the Human Interface Group some time ago and he had two of his machines setup side by side. One was OS X and the other was the latest Ubuntu.
He sat there for a good hour going through painstaking detail of simple desktop operations and just how mind boggling bad Ubuntu/Gnome is in comparision. Many of the things I already knew from my own experience but it was shocking to have them put forth in such a direct and obvious light.
Maybe everyone overestimated just what Canonical was going to do with Linux, but one has to wonder what exactly do they do all day there? My Apple friend was describing the teams of people he worked with on OS X and it wasn't some vast army of developers. It is hard to imagine that Canonical can't even get something remotely close to Apple's OS X interface technology with the employees they have.
The problem: vertical space is limited. Quick hack: put toolbars on the sides. True fix: get a rotatable monitor!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I run with the "launcher" panel on the left and the applicaion panel on the right.
Both are auto-hide. This gives an lot of screen space on widescreen monitors.
The big pain is the few icons that don't translate well to the side panels.
It would be nice if they could make the effort to implement a touch based layout without biasing against lefties. This is a significant annoyance especially with traditional mouse oriented controls like scroll bars. To do this right requires a design that minimizes the occurrence of the hand covering the screen while performing touch operations. Usually what happens is a system is designed assuming right handedness and the result is awkward to use for lefties. Ideally, applications and the window manager will dynamically change based on a user hand preference.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
We wanted to be surfing the web in under 10 seconds, and give people a fantastic web experience. We also wanted it to be possible to upgrade from that limited usage model to a full desktop.
That's a strange definition of "instant." 10 seconds.
Ubuntu Light will not have any traditional file management and it will come with a few applications installed for web, media, mail etc.
This is what really caught my eye.
From the iPhone to the new Ubuntu, the wet dream of Hollywood and RIAA - a closed user-inaccessible file system seems to be making the rounds everywhere, including (evidently) in open source. It seem to be a part of an overall push not just to wring the last bits of control from the hands of the users, but to ensure that the users will be content consumers, not content creators.
This is a joke, right? Instant-on is mentioned about 15 times throughout the article.
I'm out of karma, but let's see here:
The title mentions instant-on 1 time. The summary mentions instant-on 0 times. I can hardly be bothered to RTFA, but generally I expect the FTS to mention something somewhat related to the fucking title.
What a sane decision. Why not lose the top panel, too? I've been going with a vertical panel (only) in KDE for a long time now. Even before I had a widescreen monitor it saved the "right kind" of space. (KDE 4's taskbar widget automatically strips the text off the buttons at that size/orientation, leaving only icons... they're usually informative enough.)
No default GNOME shell? Going for lightweight, rather than modular? I don't see this as a logical direction for Ubuntu.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file. I practically guarantee that unthawing that state, then tweaking it afterwards (kill -HUP is your friend) will be faster than any staged booting or threaded booting could ever be. The only exception is a daemon or other service that creates a large amount of state at start-time. Then, you simply create your clean image to exclude such services and start them once the image is in place.
An alternative would be to do something similar, but instead of actually loading the software, you load and freeze hooks. This won't be quite as fast, but a frozen image of application hooks and corresponding DLL hooks (and perhaps the filesystem kernel modules) should be small enough to fit into a flash chip. This would "pre-boot" the computer without having to actually parse the init scripts and without having to have a full ramfs boot stage.
In both these cases, I'm picturing that when you change any init script or any of the packages involved, the machine would need to rebuild the fast-boot images. This means that updating low-level packages would place a LOT more strain on the system. On the other hand, disk access is slow, scripts are slow and starting heavier applications is also slow. Cutting two of these three out would massively boost startup times, cutting all three out would be damn-near instant-on.
(You actually could get instant-on with Coreboot + a running system image, and given that thumb drives have a larger capacity than older desktop systems, it's not impossible to imagine having such a system. Oh, and Coreboot works on a hell of a lot of platforms these days, for those who dismiss it as architecture-impaired. It's not perfect and it can be a pain at times as-is, but the one thing it's not short of is supported platforms.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
8th line of the summary:
Second, we'll expand that left-hand launcher panel so that it is touch-friendly. With relatively few applications required for instant-on environments, [...]
Linux is basically stuck with a bunch of independent technologies controlled by disparate groups who have no interest in each other.
Until some commercial entity like Google comes along an does a top to bottom remake of the Linux desktop like they did with Android when it left the crappy Linux cellphone OSs in the dust, Canonical is basically stuck with duct taping a bunch of poorly designed part together to try to give the appearance of a commercial quality desktop OS.
Canonical is clueless and incompetent compared to Apple but the sorry state of desktop Linux certainly isn't their fault.
Horizontal space is cheap, unless you decide to run two applications side-by-side. This is a scenario which is extremely common for people who are writing a document (HTML, Latex, most programming languages, maybe also 3d editors) and like to have a preview of what they're writing/drawing/programming. Unfortunately, despite widescreens turning more and more popular, window managers do not seem to have caught on the trend. AFAICT, only with some obscure tiling window managers such as Awesome and Xmonad or some scripting uber-hacks can you have two applications side-by-side without resizing them manually every time (which is a PITA). Thanks Ubuntu, neat idea, but I would rather have the toolbars on the top and bottom, and some support for tiling horizzontally side-by-side two windows.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Two thoughts:
1) Moving the max/min/close buttons now makes sense.
2) Dash reminds me a LOT of KDE 4's start menu.
I generally like the idea, especially with the goal of allowing KDE apps to seemlessly integrate. I still have issues with using the gnome base when I think LXDE has a far better upside (in my opinion) with respect to low power computing but I hope that Unity does continue to evolve and prosper.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I've been doing this for years in Windows and OSX for the same reasons Shuttleworth has stated it: widescreen monitors Glad to see a system embrace this concept and see where it would go logically if done by default and per design (instead of just an alternate option).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
What the fuck did you just type?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
I have OS X on a Dell Mini 10v.
Dock on the left side. The sleep mode gives me instant-on operation and extends the stock battery life to 8 hours.
OS X renders beautifully. This is a great netbook experience. Of course, it's a hack... But it's a glorious hack.
If there's one thing that is not optimal, it's the Apple menu across the top of the screen. I suggest that Ubuntu for netbooks have the horizontal menu extend from the left-side dock. Or hide the menu automatically.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
It's also true for regular Ubuntu I guess, but it just noticed it with the screenshot in TFA for some reason: that whole bar at the top of the screen completely defeats the purpose of Chromium's "tabs at the top of the screen" approach.
Joking, Right? This is /. The title and the summary need have no relation to the article or themselves. YMBNH. :)
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I like the direction Ubuntu is taking. Instant-on, thinking about how to better use screen real-estate. These are things that have been on my mind for a long time, but I don't have the clout to get it done. Now Ubuntu is doing these things that I have been thinking about. I am looking forward to the results!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Do what I did, replace them with nice-looking plain bold TEXT.
Horizontal or Vertical, they work. Eventually you get to know
where the app is after constant use. Ever since icons started
losing their meaning, and then started going wacky with
bubble-gum fisher price colors, I chose to make mine a business
minded desktop.
Add your own effects as well, e.g. reflection, shadow. And mostly
neutral colors, so they won't distract from color graphics work.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
This is a joke, right? Instant-on is mentioned about 15 times throughout the article.
Are jealous because your windows box takes 10 minutes to boot?
Could have been a well-done joke if you hadn't selected an OS X user :D
Different isn't always better. Sometimes, it's just different.
Instant on is great. I kind of miss the instant command prompt from the diskless Apple II days. I'm not dissing instant on.
Maybe this is the next great thing in user interfaces, but I hope there's another alternative on the install.
iPad > > > > > > > > > > > any netbook/os combo.
The iPad has sold over a MILLION units in less than a month. Ubuntu has been around for many many years and still hasn't cracked even a fraction of that user base.
Once again, Apple shows how it is done, and open source FAILS big time.
The great thing about it, is right next to the open program buttons is close a maximized window, this is very touch friendly indeed.
if the window controls are on the left, the launcher should be on the right, allowing 2 things.
1) the window controls are more Fitzy if using a mouse
2) a miss of launch does not close.
who is designing the UI's at canonical?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Are jealous because your OS X box takes 20 minutes to boot?
Here you go ....
Moving the toolbar to the left of the screen isn't just good for using screen space on a widescreen laptop- it's great for touch interfaces as well. I have a touchscreen laptop, and I find myself often wrapping my left hand around the monitor, with my thumb interacting with the screen. It falls perfectly where the new toolbar will be. Win.
Coreboot STILL isn't supported in my 5 year old system (an Asus M2N-MX). How exactly isn't a 5 year old ASUS included in "a hell of a lot of platforms"?
For those of you interested in InstantOn action, there already is Mandriva InstantOn that has some similar design goals (couple of chosen programs, fast boot).
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
Is this really a new concept? How can anyone say this is "awesome" when all you had to do before was shove DockbarX on a GNOME panel? That's all this is (except they're making their own dock for it)! Nothing to see here, people. Move along.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
The first thing I do in this wide screen world is move both panels to the left of my screen. Then I get rid of as many toolbars as I can, usually leaving only the file menu and maybe a navigation toolbar.
I'm not a fan of scrolling. I'd rather view it a screen at a time, like flipping a page of a book, by hitting the PgDn key.
Ubuntu's trend seems to be limiting the users ability to modify ubuntu to our preferences. In 10.04 they have remove the tools to modify the login. They kept the tools for managing Palm Pilots, but eliminated the kernel modules that allow any connection.
Coreboot STILL isn't supported in my 5 year old system (an Asus M2N-MX). How exactly isn't a 5 year old ASUS included in "a hell of a lot of platforms"?
What a silly question.
All the non-Asus platforms made in the last 10 years would still be "a hell of a lot of platforms", just not the one you personally own...
(Mine wasn't supported by Coreboot last I checked, either...)
Bow-ties are cool.
Let's see. It's not listed specifically on the webpage, but the webpage always lags behind the patches, so unless you've downloaded a copy, you can't be certain the support hasn't been added.
Secondly, I don't know if the specs match another configuration that is named as supported, but if it does, the label doesn't matter.
Thirdly, there are a hell of a lot of motherboards out there. Let's say Coreboot supported 99% of all motherboards. There would still then be 1 in every 100 that they didn't, by definition. This would include older boards as well as newer ones, especially in the case of something as fugly as ASUS.
Fourthly, since you can slap together basic support by putting together a profile that defines the processor, support chips and other ultra-standard parts, you could have offered a starter profile for them at any time. You still could. Why are you posting about what Coreboot doesn't list, when you could be extending that very list at any moment?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So they're wasting time on configuration options that I can (and do) change myself, instead of getting back on track toward their stated goal of producing a distro that "just works." Warty was a major breakthrough in usability, but it's only been downhill from there.
this is what they moved the control buttons to the right side of the window for? Some animated icon in the top right corner to let me know that the application is "doing something"?
Ummmm.... yeah. Don't really know what to say to that.
To the left of the screen? No, no, no... it's called "the wharf" and it sits at the right of the screen: http://xwinman.org/screenshots/bowman-matt.gif
This is a joke, right? Instant-on is mentioned about 15 times throughout the article.
Instant-on! Apply directly to the instant!
First, we want to move the bottom panel to the left of the screen, and devote that to launching and switching between applications. That frees up vertical space for web content, at the cost of horizontal space, which is cheaper in a widescreen world.
Than sounds a lot like my fvwm config that I have been using for the last about 10 years. Just replace gdm with slim and gnome with fvwm and you get a blazingly fast environment that consumes almost no memory.
AccountKiller
My windows 7 box from a cold start boots to desktop in less than a minute. 'course, my vista laptop never got anywhere near that, nor my XP computer. :P
Ezekiel 23:20
My copy of 7 takes longer from a cold boot when using virtual box.
XP was under a minute with the same resources allocated to it..
The first thing I change on a Gnome system is to collapse the two panels into one. It is totally stupid on a laptop machine to have two panels.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Interesting, Unity looks exactly like the Opera web browser. I love the sidebar.
what exactly was the reason/logic in moving the buttons to the left? i tried to find some blog, some explanation but have come up with a blank everywhere. they just did it to amuse themselves.
also, what is this shit about "instant-on"? my linux/windows pcs come up from suspend in about 1 second. i dare ubuntu "instant-on" to boot up faster. and you will have to count the bios also.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
how are boot up times even relevant now? even vista had decent standby support. in every pc (win or lin), you just close the lid if you are on the laptop or press the sleep button in case of a desktop. and when you want to use it, you just open the lid or move your mouse. the login screen comes up in a second. ubuntu has been aiming wrong for a while now.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
That screenshot represents work in progress. Look at the mock-up to see what they are aiming for in the final result.
Have you guys tried Haiku (the BeOS remake ) ? Yesterday, was incidentally their Alpha2 release and it was what an instant-on OS should be like. Booting was under 5 seconds and it was beautiful.
The install zip file was just 196 mb.
I don't know about him but mine takes less than 60 seconds from cold boot, 5 seconds from sleep. Of course I'm not dumpster diving for my PCs like Linux users. Burn baby, Burn.
Seriously though about TFA, this is getting as bad as that XKCD comic about Linux and flash! Why not, and this is just a thought, I'm just throwing this out here, instead of worrying about new whiz bang features and which side of the screen a button should be on, how about, and this is just a thought, you actually spend some time on QA and bug fixes so when I update half my fucking hardware doesn't break! How about that?
Hell you can't even buy one of those Dell OEMs Ubuntu netbooks according to the guy I was talking to here on /. and update the thing without sound and wireless shitting itself! How fucked up is that, when you gotta trawl forums even for the fricking machine made for Ubuntu?
Look, nobody is asking for miracles here, just a little QA, okay? Everyone here says Linux is ready for the desktop, but there is no way in hell me or any other retailer can sell the thing if it is gonna break if you dare to turn updates on. Nobody is asking that you support everything on the planet either, just that you make a list that says "This shit WILL WORK period" and then make sure that the parts on that list will work, no matter what. Then you can slowly but surely expand the list, and retailers will have basic configurations that they will know can walk out of their store running your OS and not shit themselves and die if an update comes out.
Because as it is the only ones you are gonna sell Linux to is the "geeks who buy on the Internet and are self supporting and willing to use an alternate OS" and that is a market that frankly just ain't growing, and is probably shrinking when guys like me get tired of hunting for fixes after every update and just switch to a Mac or PC. I have plenty of customers whom the Linux security model would seriously benefit, but I'm not providing free lifetime tech support okay? And I really don't think it is too much to ask to not have to look at the updates notification like a "bork Linux" button.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Did anyone else notice the browser title?
Does that imply that this is the Google OS.
I have the audio torrent recorded for this keynote if anyone wants to actually listen to it ...
uds-m.keynote.mp3.torrent
I am not the poster you are replied to, but I reckon many things that go for me go for him, too.
First of all, I would like to thank you for pointing out the things you pointed out, because they weren't clear to me before.
``Let's see. It's not listed specifically on the webpage, but the webpage always lags behind the patches, so unless you've downloaded a copy, you can't be certain the support hasn't been added.
Secondly, I don't know if the specs match another configuration that is named as supported, but if it does, the label doesn't matter.''
This, of course, is true. On the other hand, there is a difference between "supported" as in "it happens to work" and "supported" as in "we actually make sure it works". I would imagine that the latter category would be listed in the table, and when I am thinking to deploy Coreboot (or most products, for that matter), I want to make sure my platform is in the "we make sure it works" category.
``Thirdly, there are a hell of a lot of motherboards out there. Let's say Coreboot supported 99% of all motherboards. There would still then be 1 in every 100 that they didn't, by definition.''
Right. They are currently claiming support for 215 motherboards. That is, honestly, quite impressive. I really wish to congratulate them on that. On the other hand, I reckon it doesn't even come close to "your motherboard is probably supported", which is where I think we want to be. :-)
``Fourthly, since you can slap together basic support by putting together a profile that defines the processor, support chips and other ultra-standard parts, you could have offered a starter profile for them at any time.''
Alright. How does that work? Can I just compile a list of parts that are on my motherboard, send it to them, and expect to get a bootable image in the near future? Because that would be fantastic.
``Why are you posting about what Coreboot doesn't list, when you could be extending that very list at any moment?''
In my case, it's mostly ignorance and lack of time. I think Coreboot is a fantastic project and I wish them great success. On the other hand, that goes for hundreds of other projects, too. I wish I had the time to contribute to all of them!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Am I the only one to notice the buttons on the *RIGHT* for the Chromium/Chrome browser on those screenshots?
If they move the buttons to the left, I expect every window to have them there...
PS: I know it's Chromium's fault for doing things that the window manager is supposed to do. However, that does not matter to the end user.
A great big Bravo to those developers that try to push back the computing barriers. Open source should lead the way by experimenting with new designs, because it is free (as in beer).
I have UNR 10.04 on my acer one (atom N270) it takes 25 seconds to boot to the login screen plus a further 5 seconds to login, 9 seconds of that were spent before the grub had loaded. only problem now is the shut down time is like 30 seconds just wasting my time... only issue i have with canonical is they locked the panel in UNR so you cant add applets!
I think its a second-rate tactic to improve the user experience. Windows and (moreso) Ubuntu both had imperfect support of sleep and suspend modes, so they both focused on making the OS really fast booting.
OTOH a well-integrated device should sleep and wake seamlessly. Macs achieve this, as do most phones, PDAs and media players. But reading about this new direction for Ubuntu basically says to me: "We think sleep mode is too hard and want to rely on fast boot instead."
How much ya wanna bet that 2 years from now the instant booting feature will be another boondoggle, half-forgotten because the same lack of proper hardware support and integration that bedevils sleep mode for Linux distros also matters when it comes to transcending the normal boot process.
The proper approach for any computing platform would be to say "even though we have this great generally usable code, here is a list of specific computer models that we test on and expect Linux to work properly on". MS doesn't do this, leaving it to the hardware people to fill most of the gaps, which is why I see a lot MS techies pulling their hair out over things like Windows failing to return from sleep on 2-year old Intel and ASUS motherboards (and that doesn't even touch on the decrepitude found on Acer and similar PC brands). With Linux-based distros, its a bit worse because rarely does any system OEM target Linux through design to marketing phases. MS is too chickens--t to say "these models work best" and the Linux Foundation, Canonical and the rest are too lazy or disinterested in end-user issues to do the same.
Maybe soon I can retire my collection of old xboxen.
At the moment there's nothing to quite match them for instant on XBMC access.
(Though they struggle with some pointlessly high def formats.)
All I need is instant-on Ubuntu and for the XBMC team to work out how to implement horizontal scroll without an XBOX controller.
(The current linux version is unusable for listening to audiobooks as the mouse can't be used to scroll within a track.)
People who can't manage a simple branched hierachy of files, usually aren't doing much "content creation".
Selling one device for "content consumption" and a different device costing an order of magnitude more for "content creation" contributes to a class divide between authors and audiences. That's why you don't see more independent video games: it costs $300 for a game console but $3,000 or more for a devkit. In this view, jailbreaks are a weapon in the class war.
if you leave out the complexity, which is largely based on file management and text file configuration, you can sell it to non-hobbyist users as a relatively hassle-free experience
The danger here is that if you sell locked-down devices to non-hobbyists, then what you sell to hobbyists might lose its economies of scale, and hobbyists might no longer be able to afford it. Then the market starts to support non-hobbyists and companies, leaving the hobbyists with nothing. This has already happened in parts of the video game market.
Since when does everything have to be geared around content creation? Content creators are not the target audience here
The word "content" confuses things, so can you be more specific? I'll pretend you meant "works of authorship", and photos, e-mails, and Facebook posts certainly qualify as this.
Not every device has to be geared towards the tech-savvy.
But if devices unsuited for the tech-savvy pass some point in popularity, the loss of economies of scale for devices geared towards the tech-savvy will likely make them unaffordable. This has already happened in other markets; want to know more?
Widescreen monitors waste tons of horizontal space and suffer a real lack of vertical space.
A 1680x1050-pixel monitor is good for reading two documents side-by-side if you use a window manager with a tiling feature. Microsoft has been playing up the new Snap feature in Windows 7, but even Windows XP has this: click one window in the taskbar, Ctrl+right click the other window, and choose Tile Vertically.
Huh, interesting... So I guess my mainboard may be supported, but it may also be a question of how well it's supported...
I have always wanted to try it, but I must admit to being a little bit afraid of the prospect. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
But consider -- aren't widescreen monitors better for first-person shooters?
For the same overall pixel count - I imagine so. Unless it's a game with a heavy emphasis on vertical aiming... That's one point in their favor, and I guess HD video would be a second.
Personally, though, those two things don't rank high on my list of computer uses.
Bow-ties are cool.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file.
It's been done. I seem to remember someone who hacked Windows so that shutdown would actually reboot and suspend. But under Ubuntu, that would work only if hardware makers cooperate with Linux developers on getting devices to hibernate correctly.
Windows 7 actually has a neat feature for this - drag a window to an edge, and it "snaps" to fit half the screen.
Do it with another window on the other side, and there you go, two windows side by side.
Hell, even XP has this. Click one button in the task bar, Ctrl+right click another, and choose Tile Vertically.
Yeah. Boottimes are only relevant first boot on the day. But really, there is no matter is it 15 seconds or 30 seconds. Important thing is just it ain't counted in minutes!
You are correct on the "it's tested and verified" vs "it works". And, yes, if you were to deploy on a major site, you want to be on the "it's tested and verified" list. In the case of the guy I was replying to, he was referring to an old ASUS PC, which means it's not a production site. It's probably not even his primary computer any more.
In the case of generating a profile, pretty well everything in Coreboot is a module and a platform is just a collection of modules. Remember, Coreboot is not a full BIOS (OpenBIOS is), it's just a bootstrap that needs to know only enough to get things going and initialize any hardware that the BIOS would need to initialize rather than the OS. That means that if there's a standard, existing configuration that's similar to what you want except that component X is used instead of component Y, but component X is already a standard component that's supported, then you can add support by tweaking a configuration file. If you look at the patches for adding mobos, that's often exactly what they do. They just list a different set of components for that board.
So it's simpler than having to send the list in, just paste the list in and you're pretty much there.*
*There are exceptions to this - there are non-standard and freakish situations which get mentioned on the changelogs for the patches. However, if you start with something very similar, you're about as safe as whenever you upgrade your BIOS or firmware through any other means.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I still can't tell if they are eliminating the close button, if they aren't I don't think it should be immediately next to open a browser button, nor should it be 2 inches from the edge when maximized.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg