Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Released

RandyDownes sends word that Canonical has released the beta version of Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). The release announcement boasts faster boot times, GNOME 2.31, and a speedier version of Evolution. In addition, "The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new 'Featured' and 'What's New' views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history too." The release notes and download page are both available.

Comments

So where's the "close" button this time?

[Compaqt]

Bottom middle?

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[pyrosine]

Top left again

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[multisync]

Easily fixed in gconf-editor though.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically you think the entire beta distro is pretty much perfect, except the worse problem you can find with it is a single user changable setting doesn't default to your preference?

That really is amazing!

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[fbjon]

Choose a different theme.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you care? You have already posted before that you will never try Linux again and plan on sticking with Windows... Which is fine, but there is NO need for you to be asking that question.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[ferd_farkle]

Last week, somebody handed me a paper to read, but the damned thing is upside-down. I'm still trying to figure it out.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Runaway1956]

Top right, on my 10.4 desktop. Crap - you can edit any settings on a Linux desktop. Nothing is cast in stone - not even the kernel! (Of course, I think NTKRNL should have been cast into the sea, along with Bill Gates, but that is a bit irrelevant.)

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Beelzebud]

In Preferences, choose a theme with the buttons on the left, then choose Customize, and select which Controls, and Window Border you want. Problem solved.

No need to use gconf-editor at all.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[TheLink]

Defaults are important if you are going to roll something out to thousands of desktops.

It has to be decent or half decent at least, so you don't get so many calls.
It has to be consistent too, so that you don't so many calls and so that when you get the calls you don't waste extra time trying to figure out where the fuck is the close button is.

That's why many large corporations aren't rolling out Windows 7 over night, and they even upgrade Windows 7 machines to XP when they buy them. Windows 7 changed many things for little gain (Vista doesn't even exist as far as many corps are concerned ;) ). The rest are doing it by attrition (only as new machines come in).

So the fact that "Desktop Linux" can't even get simple stuff like this right isn't going to help acceptance at all. Think long and hard about where you want to put your menus, close buttons, cancel and OK, and then STICK TO IT. Stop fucking around with it.

Unless of course you have a powerful reality distortion field like Steve Jobs.

p.s. Those stupid wobbly windows and zillions of themes aren't worth anything when it comes to productivity. Making it easy for users to change themes just makes it hard for Support to help them over the phone if they pick something really different.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[multisync]

And how do you fix it just using a mouse?

I'm usually looking for a "keyboard only" solution, like this's one:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string menu:minimize,maximize,close

But I suppose you could click at the beginning of the above, hold and drag your mouse to the end, right click the block of selected text, select "copy," click Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal, right click next to the flashing prompt, select "paste" ... hmmmm ... okay, anyone know how to get the "Run" command in Gnome with a mouse click instead of Alt-F2 so this guy can click "OK" insteak of pressing his Enter key?

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Belial6]

No, They realized in the rush to be more Mac like, they got the button wrong, so now sometimes it closes the applicaions and sometimes it just closes the window and leaves the application running windowless in the task bar. is now in a context sensitive menu on a monitor that may or may not be the monitor running your application.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this was the point. They moved the buttons because they are planing a total overhaul of the DE soon which will require buttons on the right. So the decided to get people used to it early on.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[dissy]

okay, anyone know how to get the "Run" command in Gnome with a mouse click instead of Alt-F2 so this guy can click "OK" insteak of pressing his Enter key?

Applications -> accessories -> terminal

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if I were rolling out Ubuntu on a corporate desktop the first thing I would do is turn off comiz. Not just turn it off but uninstall it and threaten to fire anyone who re-installs it. I'd select a single theme for corporate use, but I'd let the user choose their own background. Maybe.

As for the location of the close button, I'd just disable it. You start letting workers close their applications, next thing you know they'll want to go home at night.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Defaults are indeed important. First this: I don't like anyone messing with the placement of my buttons, their rightful place is top-right.

However, I also think that Ubuntu (and in a more general sense, every distro out there) has done an unbelievable amount of work to give us a free (both definitions) operating system. And if "they" think the buttons should go someplace else, well, that's their choice. It is not a whole lot of trouble for me to configure them to their one and only true position. Sure, if I ever get Emperor of the Universe, my first decree will be that moving buttons from their correct placement will be a flogging offence. But until that time I'm not too concerned about doing a little configuring to get thing to my liking.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Beelzebud]

And forgive my typo there... "choose a theme with buttons on the left", should read "choose a theme with buttons on the right." :)

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[multisync]

Applications -> accessories -> terminal

That's what I did, but you still have to press the enter key after the command in the terminal. commodore64_love (1445365) wants a solution that only requires the use of the mouse.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[xur17]

http://www.tuxguides.com/move-window-buttons-to-right-side-ubuntu-10-04/ A one line command you can paste into the terminal.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[trapnest]

And why do they belong on the top right? Oh yes, Microsoft put them there.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[GameboyRMH]

If gconf-editor were still accessible from the System menu by default, it could be done...

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[trapnest]

NTOSKRNL

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[oji-sama]

Didn't test, but I'm pretty sure that enter can also be copied.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why you reference Microsoft in this discussion. The reason I think the buttons are supposed to go top right is because GEOS on the Commodore 64 has them (well, 'it') there.

Not everything in this universe is stolen and subsequently claimed to be invented by Microsoft, you know.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[rcamans]

So you are saying that they need a "Support" theme?

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[grim4593]

He could use the on screen keyboard for all of that too.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[dissy]

When you copy the line, don't just select from start to end, but include the new line.

That is, start at the beginning of the command, click, and just pull down one line.
You will select the newline as well, which will also paste the enter.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Omestes]

Thinking that editing a gconf value or changing a desktop theme is as simple as turning a paper upside down to the average Joe PC user.

but we're talking Gnome, on Ubuntu, which is a flavor of Linux. None of these terms encapsulate "average Joe PC user". The expectations are a bit higher.

Outside of this, it is far easier to switch your buttons/theme on Gnome (or KDE, or XFCE, or whatever windows manager you like) then it is to switch them in Windows or OS X. In neither of these can you really muck with the GUI outside of using 3rd party tools.

If you use Ubuntu daily, and you complain about where the buttons are, then I have very little sympathy for you. Ubuntu is far more customizable than any of the mainstream OSs. You actually have a choice on where you want your buttons.

If you don't like it, and are too lazy to spend 10 second on Googling the simple solution, then download a different distro that puts the buttons where you want them on install.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[IANAAC]

I'm not sure why you reference Microsoft in this discussion. The reason I think the buttons are supposed to go top right is because GEOS on the Commodore 64 has them (well, 'it') there.

Not everything in this universe is stolen and subsequently claimed to be invented by Microsoft, you know.

No, some things are also stolen, then "invented" by Apple too.

Seriously, when 10.04 came out with the buttons in the upper left, I thought it was misguided too. But for kicks, I decided to leave them that way to see if it was actually usable for me. Guess what? After a day or two, I liked it. I haven't changed them.

You know, I really think it just comes down to spatial memory. After having used 10.04 with the buttons in the upper left, whenever I go and use a windows machine, my eyes automatically go there looking for the buttons.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it is spatial memory, or just being used to the buttons being somewhere.

As a matter of fact I grew up with C64's GEOS (top right), then an Amiga (top left _and_ right), then RISCOS (also both left and right). After that came a period of confusion where I'd change windows managers like crazy on Linux.

Then I found Gnome and life has been good to me ever since. Somehow it just fits my way of working, I'm not sure why I like it so much.

At the moment I'm still on 9.10 (read too much about 10.04) but I'm upgrading to 10.10 if initial reviews don't have any showstoppers.

Rant: if only Pulseaudio got axed... That would be the best upgrade ever... ;-)

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottom left?

Hint: Desktop Linux is

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

he doesn't care. he's making a point.

..rhetoric duh! insightful?

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[siloko]

I don't think 'typo' means what you think it means . . .

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[ToreTS]

Yeah, this is one of my pet peeves with Firefox as well. Everytime I upgrade, some default setting is changed, such as the behaviour of the tab close buttons, the location bar etc., and then I have to spend time tweaking settings in order to get things back the way I want it. It has gone so far that I put off upgrading Firefox until they stop putting out security patches for the old version. It was the same when upgrading to Thunderbird 3, and judging by the Mozilla forums, I'm not the only one experiencing this. Maintaining consistency is definitely important for the "non-geeky" users, and it seems that at least some open-source development teams do not get this.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[hedwards]

To be fair Ubuntu has some serious issues which nobody has felt like dealing with. For instance being unable to log in with a bluetooth keyboard. From what I gather you can do some configuration hacking to make it work, but it seems kind of silly that even once you do log in that it still frequently isn't enough to get the keyboard working.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Beelzebud]

No it was a typo. I type very fast, and it's easy to mistype a word like 'left' or 'right', without noticing at first. Regardless, I've been modded redundant for offering up some help, so no good deed went unpunished.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[FoolishOwl]

I can understand the frustration with a user interface change, even a trivial one that's easy to change back. But it bugs me that most reviews I read of new Ubuntu releases focus exclusively on trivial user interface changes, and ignore changes to the internals.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[internettoughguy]

Using your package manager, install an on-screen keyboard application ;)

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[marcello_dl]

I customize buttons position on linux, old macos almost got it right: close on one side, all the others at a safe distance. For even better usability I put title next to close so it's easier to spot what you are closing.

So the button issue is irrelevant to me, technically. It's relevant philosophically because canonical seem to want to make ubuntu an unique experience.

I used different distros, old ubuntu, sidux, arch a lil, sabayon a lil. They all look linux desktops, new ubuntu feels like a linux-based new experience. It adds a lot of polish i credit them for it but i feel disoriented. But ok, if ubuntu makes it easy for people to resist windows monoculture it is ok with me. Hopefully they stay close to the other distros communities, esp. deb based, so both parties can gain.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[JonasH]

Except the button placing was independent of themes last I checked. Maybe they fixed that?

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure defaults are important, but that doesn't mean you can't change them from time to time. Upon hearing the new placement of the window title buttons, my first reaction was apprehension; After using them for a while though I have now come to prefer it to the previous default placement. In this instance does that mean "Desktop Linux" got it right? I think so in my case at least.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[selven]

And how do you fix it just using a mouse?

On-screen keyboard.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Erikderzweite]

Actually.
I had a colleague once who has closed all the programs by double-clicking program icon top left. He could not explain why does he do this himself, he did it purely out of habit. But then it hit me: Windows 3.11. What many forgot, it did not have the "close" button, you could close the window by double-clicking top left icon. So even for Microsoft the "close" has been top left once.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

JonasH -- yup. Once 10.4 was actually released, you just had to change theme. It's trivial.

And I have to admit, I kinda like it on my laptop. The complete default package puts most everything together in the upper left, and that works really well with a trackpad. On my desktops though, not a chance.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Erikderzweite]

You can't really have a revolution every six month. New package's versions, new kernel, that's not something you can review, especially if nothing ground-braking has happened in these packages. Besides, you can't comment on stability as well with the release being still beta.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[DaVince21]

gconf-editor is a graphical settings editor.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[dave420]

I've never wanted to change the positions of the buttons in Windows. Wanting to do so seems a rather alien concept to me. I'm not saying anyone's wrong or that any OS is better than any others, just that wanting to change button positions probably doesn't matter to nearly every user out there.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Risen888]

Why, is your keyboard broken? They're cheap, y'know. Probably go to goodwill and get one for like two bucks.

Hey, how'd you type this post?

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Risen888]

Seriously? If it's your job to roll out and support a bunch of Gnome desktops and you don't know how to set up and lock down a Gnome desktop, you are in the wrong business.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

All you need to do use the System -> Preferences -> Main Menu wizard and you can move any link in any menu to any other menu. Most likely the gconf-editor is still available in Ubuntu's menu system it just isn't activated. To activate it in Debian Sid you just open up the Main Menu wizard and navitage to the System menu and put a checkmark in the box next to Configuration Editor.

It's incredibly easy to do. It just seems like many Linux users haven't spent the time to see what abilities have been built into their systems. .

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[snookums]

No, some things are also stolen, then "invented" by Apple too.

Seriously, when 10.04 came out with the buttons in the upper left, I thought it was misguided too. But for kicks, I decided to leave them that way to see if it was actually usable for me. Guess what? After a day or two, I liked it. I haven't changed them.

Actually it is misguided. Given that "my other computer is a Mac" I figured I'd be fine with it and give it a try. Within 10 minutes I'd decided I'd never use it and switched the buttons back to the right. You know why? Because I went for the File menu, overshot and hit the close button by accident.

The top-left close button works in OS X because the menu bar is stuck to the top of the screen, not the window. Unless Gnome Global Menu is added by default, it's a bad UI design choice.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[tehcyder]

And why do they belong on the top right? Oh yes, Microsoft put them there.

I think it is more to do with the fact that Western languages read from left to right, and you turn pages at the top right hand part of the page (usually).

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[canistel]

By that logic we should all be removing the minimize + maximize buttons too... just in case, you know, you overshoot and hit the close?

A well designed app will ask you to "confirm close" if you have unsaved work. I don't see the problem here.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu's market includes your grandmother, if she's still living. We're out to embrace intuition, extend what 'average Joe PC user' can do with his computer, and eliminate Windows.

It's become quite apparent that in the short term to pit ourselves as a viable alternative to Windows, it may be best to sell ourselves as a serious competitor of the Mac. Most of our best points are the same, and where they're not, they will be. We've had good docks for a while, we're just getting a global menu bar system working between GTK and Qt that we're shipping default in the netbook edition, and now window controls are on the left. Have you ever compared Growl with Ayatana notifications? They're like the same.

So what? If OS X ran on PCs, it'd have three times the users that it has. That's a pretty big market.. we'll take it.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Omestes]

First, who is "we"? Ubuntu is nice, and it has done some very good thing for Linux distros as a whole, such as pushing some degree of usability and uniformity, which was terribly lacking previously. As a result I've actually managed to use Linux for a decent amount of my needs, where previously I went through hundreds of month long trials of hundreds of distos before settling back on Windows or a Mac OS flavor ("I have to hand write my own damn drivers and config files just to get an industry standard x to work? Screw this!")

That said, I really don't care if Ubuntu, or any other flavor of Linux becomes ubiquitous. Being popular isn't what drives me to an OS (unless that popularity gets wide 3rd party support, then...). I don't care if my grandmother, if she were living, uses Ubuntu, and currently I would recommended against it. I'm even pondering whether recommending Ubuntu Netbook remix for my girlfriend was a good idea. She mocks my previous Ubuntu cheerleading after seeing what a futile pain it was to set up my HTPC with a Nvidea ION chip (failed getting sound over HDMI repeatedly, even after rebuilding basically everything). She also mocks the fact that I still, despite over a week of work haven't got it doing a job as music box as well as a Mac, out of the box.

Another example, you can't edit the configs of your damn screensavers without installing xscreensavers, which does strange thing to power managament while co--installed with the default Gnome savers.

While hateful, both of these problems show Linux' strength, as well as its weaknesses. Linux is a tinkerer OS, its for those of us who still, for whatever strange reason, want complete control over our system. To increase in popularity "we" would have to sacrifice this aggravating and empowering identity. But, once Ubuntu, or any other Linux flavor, becomes popular to the masses, it would have to alienate its core. And in the case of OSS software, once you piss of the geeks, you piss off your developers, the very people who make your software. Also, if Ubuntu turns into Windows 2 or OS X 2, it isn't competing anymore. If I had to choose for a silly, locked down OS, would I choose the unsupported, kudgy one, or the one backed by millions of dollars of development and a huge amount of hours of testing? Outside of the ideological bits of open source, the answer is pretty clear.

Most people don't care about GPL, or open source, or whatnot.

The other nice thing about Ubuntu is that it is Linux for noobs, it drives people into open source, and into alternative operating systems. It keeps the hobby alive, and forestalls the inevitable hell that will be computers as pure appliance.

Ideally Ubuntu would take Linux to where OS X (or NeXT) was supposed to take BSD. A very, very powerful core, on beneath of a very well designed gui. OS X started to fail when they decided locking things down, and copying 3rd party developers (to roll in their products as OS bloat, and advertising features) too precident over keeping things flexible. iOS moves this further towards the nasty walled-garden approach, and iOS is probably the future of all mainstream OSs, sadly.

Copying other OSs isn't going to be one of Linux strong points, if viewed from any other perspective than merely the size of the user base. Sure it makes ease of transition fine, but what is going to keep the people there? Hell, do away with buttons for all I care, rewrite GUI conventions completely. Make it as different as possible from OS X and Windows.

Make an OS based completely off of Gnome-do and the upcoming Gnome Shell, at that point windows widgets become completely superfluous.

Sorry for the rant, AC, had a bit too much coffee this morning.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[rhomp2002]

My only problem is that when I have multiple windows open the far left window makes the buttons unreachable. Now to close the window I need to shift the window right and then close it. I see no god reason for changing it in the first place. Just a PITA where none was needed.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[commodore64_love]

And how do you fix the position of the close button while just using a mouse? (And not needing to confer with a manual to learn esoteric CLI commands.)
.

>>>You have already posted before that you will never try Linux again

That's not true. I just installed Lubuntu 10.04 on my laptop. I'm not anti-linux. I'm just anti-non standard OSes (including Mac) that won't run the things I want to run. Like a friggin' piece of software that will play back videos at double speed, without making everyone sound like chipmunks. I can find that on Windows without hardly trying, but for Linux and Mac OSes it simply doesn't exist.

I'm also anti-user friendly designs and Linux sure as hell qualifies. I can't even get Flash video to run properly on this piece of shit. I keep getting a "lack sufficient permissions to install" even though I am logged in as the Administrator.
.

>>>and plan on sticking with Windows...

Well that's true. I also plan to keep using VHS not betamax, Bluray not HDdvd, and NTSC rather than PAL TVs. It is easier to stick with what 90-99% of everybody else is using, rather than buck the trend.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[commodore64_love]

Not demanding anyything different from what Amiga and Mac and Windows OSes provide (the ability to adjust settings using only a mouse).

If Linux wants to be the "desktop OS" than it needs to rise to the same ease-of-use as the big boys.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Yfrwlf]

I think this may be a big enough feature and annoyance to many users that it would be nice to see an option for changing it in the theme section somewhere. There are options for "controls", "colors", "window border", "icons", and "pointer". I think "button position" trumps the importance of some of these options and thus should be included somewhere somehow.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[multisync]

And several solutions were provided for you. In fact, if you were to *choose* another window manager, you would probably find there are even more solutions.

If Amiga, Mac and Windows OSes want to be taken seriously, they should look in to providing their users with the kind of choice we enjoy in the *nix world.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[multisync]

I'm also anti-user friendly designs and Linux sure as hell qualifies. I can't even get Flash video to run properly on this piece of shit. I keep getting a "lack sufficient permissions to install" even though I am logged in as the Administrator.

Sounds to me like you're running Windows 7 or (G*d help me) Vista.

Re:So where's the "close" button this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's probably because most people don't spend their computer time looking at 'internals'

Canonical are nothing but a bunch of freeloading asshats who couldn't produce a decent OS if they were paid to...well in that case maybe they could.

Freeloading off Debian and demanding changes upstream is not the way forward. AFAIC Shuttleworth can eat dick

Re:Ubunu 1 music store vs Apple music store.

[eli0001]

The same people saying "Free Iphone" want to send you money from Nigeria, too.

10.10?

[camperdave]

I thought the 10 stood for the release year, and the .10 for the release month. This is only 10.09, so what gives?

Re:10.10?

[Lawand]

This is a beta version. The final release is scheduled for October (10.10)

Re:10.10?

[airfoobar]

It's still a beta.

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the 10 stood for the release year, and the .10 for the release month. This is only 10.09, so what gives?

It is the beta, the final release is targeted for next month.

Re:10.10?

[mangu]

The final release is scheduled for October (10.10)

If only they could get it out by October 10... But no such luck, I guess it will only come out at Halloween, as usual.

Re:10.10?

[commodore64_love]

I only upgraded to Lightweight Ubuntu (lubuntu) 10.0 a few days ago.

Man Ubuntu's cycle runs fast if they are already releasing another version. Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?
.

Re:10.10?

[IB4Student]

Nah, it'll come out on the 29th.

Re:10.10?

[jimicus]

Well, if you want a Linux distribution with a long release cycle, use Debian. But by the time your version is getting to the end of its cycle, it's going to start looking pretty aged.

Probably not a problem for a server, but for a desktop (where the state of the Linux desktop is still very much in flux) it makes some sense.

Re:10.10?

[timeOday]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

Microsoft isn't on any cycle. They are lost in the woods.

If you're like me and don't like the risk of upgrading all the time, pick a LTS ("Long Term Support") release, and stick with it for the next 3 years. Lucky for you, it sounds like you installed 10.04 which is an LTS release.

Re:10.10?

[camperdave]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

Well, it fits into the "Release early. Release Often." philosophy that made linux what it is today. Apart from that, one advantage is that all of the hard core folk can install it and give it a good thrashing over. All of the major hardware work-arounds will have been sorted out, major weaknesses will be eliminated, etc. A year from now, you'll have a good yea-or-nay feel for whether it is worth it to upgrade to that release.

Re:10.10?

[i.r.id10t]

In addition to what has been said in your other replies, Ubuntu is based on Debian (testing specifically). So what they are really doing is speeding up Debian releases by taking whatever -testing has and fixing it up and polishing it for the next 6 months.

Of course, since -testing just got frozen, it will be interesting to see the differences between Ubuntu 10.10 and Squeeze when it is released as the stable edition.

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it will come out on the 10th, this has already been announced. (Ubuntu 10.10 released 10/10/10).

Re:10.10?

[gamefreak1450]

According to the Ubuntu Wiki, they're planning to do this. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickReleaseSchedule Of course, we'll see how things actually turn out... but a 10.10.10 launch would be cool.

Re:10.10?

[rubycodez]

if that's too fast just follow the lubuntu LTS releases, every two years is much more relaxed

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

Apples and oranges. OS X and Microsoft Windows are barebones platforms that are useless until you install separately-purchased application software. Ubuntu is a complete computing environment that includes all the applications you are likely to need.

You may not need a major upgrade to the underlying platform every 6 months, but you don't really want to be waiting 2 years for new versions of your applications, do you?

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

except that after 6 months the backports just seem to get abandoned.

I had to setup my own repo just to support my supposedly LTS server installs of hardy.

Re:10.10?

[Tubal-Cain]

In addition to what has been said in your other replies, Ubuntu is based on Debian (testing specifically).

No, Ubuntu pulls from unstable.

Re:10.10?

[LingNoi]

They're still providing backports of security fixes for hardy because I have it installed on a server myself.

Re:10.10?

[sarhjinian]

The problem with Ubuntu's LTS releases is, well, sometimes they throw in stuff that's barely ready for a "normal" release, let alone long-term. 8.04 saw the first cut at PulseAudio, for example, which wasn't even close to ready for prime-time.

As a result, things that are broken often stay broken. Sure, you can get unsupported backports or PPAs, but you shouldn't have to in a stability-first endeavour like the LTS releases.

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy your frozen apps for three years.

Re:10.10?

[tenco]

Non-LTS releases have only a 18 month support cycle and you seriously suggest waiting 12 month of that time before deciding if you should switch?

Re:10.10?

[drinkypoo]

Non-LTS releases have only a 18 month support cycle and you seriously suggest waiting 12 month of that time before deciding if you should switch?

support cycle is relative, they still get backports. the smartest thing to do if you are concerned about such things is to never run anything but an LTS release. or run Debian stable :p

Re:10.10?

[dooby_Monster]

Don't suppose there going to release this at 10:10pm

Re:10.10?

[Simon Brooke]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

Microsoft isn't on any cycle. They are lost in the woods.

Correction: if Microsoft are on a cycle, it has two punctured tyres, a broken brake cable, and the rear derailleur has just overshifted into the spokes. Oh, and they're lost in the woods.

Re:10.10?

[FoolishOwl]

Applications and their dependencies are offered in the repositories as a coherent set.

Canonical's emphasis has been on producing a Linux distribution that appeals to desktop users. Many of the applications that desktop users most use -- Web browsers, most especially -- have significant updates frequently.

So, you can stick with the long term support (LTS) version of the distribution, if you prefer to avoid the frequent upgrades and are satisfied with older versions of the more volatile applications. If you want to keep up with the volatile applications, but still want to stick to supported respositories, go with the latest distribution.

It's almost a month and a half before the release version of the 10.10 distribution, and many Ubuntu users will prefer to wait a few weeks after that to upgrade anyway, so it's not like there's a fire under your feet.

Re:10.10?

[Elektroschock]

I personally think that 10.10 is the first release where KDE4 looks mature and ready, so I'll go with Kubuntu now.

Re:10.10?

[hedwards]

There's multiple schools of thought on the subject. MS releases a new version from time to time, Ubuntu has LTS and regular releases. Technically speaking FreeBSD does regular releases more or less as a snapshotting set up with a bit of extra QA to make sure they can promise it to work correctly, but they do technically continuously release updates and you can update at any point either with current or stable.

Which style you go with really depends upon what it is that you're doing and what hassles you're willing to put up with.

Re:10.10?

[blackest_k]

Interesting If the ac up near the top of the page is correct then you only run windows and your sole reason to post here is to troll. Why bother? you must have more of a life than that (btw the new netbook interface in maverick blows chunks ) my netbook favourite has to be 10.04 unr with gnome-shell --replace (its a little quirky but works well for me.

Re:10.10?

[Erikderzweite]

Smart thing will be also to switch to new LTS in about half a year after it has been released.
So those who use 8.04 LTS should consider updating to 10.04 sometime next month or even later this year.

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully, if they go to all that trouble, they'll delay it 10 more seconds.

Re:10.10?

[DaVince21]

Considering how they're 4 weeks ahead of schedule, I'm confident that it will come out on time, and it will be more polished than previous, sometimes rushed releases.

Re:10.10?

[DaVince21]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

In Linux's case, better hardware support for the people who don't compile their own kernel.

I mean, I bought a USB network device that apparently works in a newer kernel version only, so it'll "just work" once I install the next version. Cool beans.

Re:10.10?

[rubycodez]

you are doing something wrong, as the updates to even Dapper (server) are still flowing

Re:10.10?

[grumbel]

Man Ubuntu's cycle runs fast if they are already releasing another version. Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

A Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX release is just the OS, a Ubuntu release is the OS *and* basically all the software you'll ever use. Fast release cycles simply means that you will get new software and hardware drivers quickly. On Windows and OSX software and drivers is updated independently from the core, so it doesn't matter if the OS is a few years old.

Now of course not having a separation between OS and normal software is kind of stupid, but thats the way Linux has been for a long long while.

Re:10.10?

[commodore64_love]

A troll wrote:

>>>Interesting If the ac up near the top of the page is correct then you only run windows and your sole reason to post here is to troll. Why bother? you must have more of a life than that
>>>

That's one possibility.
The other is that the AC is wrong, and I haven't stopped using Linux.
You couldn't figure that out yourself?

Re:10.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also a third (and correct) possibility.

The AC was wrong, but you're still a troll, Troll64.

Yes?

[binarylarry]

Now with less Mark Shuttleworth.

I wonder it's going to affect this and future Ubuntu releases?

Re:Yes?

[Fri13]

Bit a bit. Mark was the leader of the Canonical. But not a leader of the Linux desktops or OSS. Not even how much Ubuntu fans would think so. The upstream works and innovated without Mark. It is same thing as you would drop off from using Ubuntu. No one notices it. But Canonical would notice it.

Re:Yes?

[Anonymous Coward]

hopefully less fapping to Apple, more innovation.

Nobody cares?

[howardd21]

Either nobody cares, or it must be a slow Slashdot day, this has been posted for 25 minutes and no comments?

Re:Nobody cares?

[IB4Student]

I care. I have already had the beta for awhile though.

Re:Nobody cares?

[airfoobar]

It's Saturday evening... maybe linux users have lives? ;)

Re:Nobody cares?

[Compholio]

Either nobody cares, or it must be a slow Slashdot day, this has been posted for 25 minutes and no comments?

It's a beta release and we're all happy with the LTS release right now?

Re:Nobody cares?

[Kilrah_il]

It's just that this site is "News for nerd, Stuff that matters", and instead we get this... this... I don't know how to call it, but "News for nerds" it ain't. That's it, boycott non-nerd stories!!!

Re:Nobody cares?

[airfoobar]

Not if you are in Europe.

Re:Nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too long troll, doesn't get the steam up. HTH, try harder next time.

Re:Nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry to hear that Linux users in Europe have no lives.

Re:Nobody cares?

[dmbasso]

iie, sunday moruningu desuyo~

Re:Nobody cares?

[treeves]

nichiyobi-no gozen? not.
douyobi-no gogo desu.

Re:Nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Her hovercraft is full of tentacles.

Re:Nobody cares?

[shutdown -p now]

I installed it, and found that neither my wired nor my wireless networking work. I wasted those 25 minutes trying to find a solution to the problem from my netbook (apparently, there is still none).

Re:Nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm busy testing Meerkat to see if it will run for several hours without lobotomizing itself, unlike "Lucid" which is anything but on my hardware? (And still hasn't fixed support for my headphone jack, broken since Karmic?)

Re:Nobody cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

unfair. European Linux users DO have lives. Some of us, anyways :)

Lucid

[JimboG]

I'm still getting 10.04 working!

Re:Lucid

[Lennie]

Luckily 10.04 is a LTS-version, if you got it right you can stay with it for 3 years. So it is not all wasted ;-)

Re:Lucid

[CarpetShark]

I'm still waiting for them to fix the release-critical bugs in 10.04 :( At least, they'd be release-critical by Debian's better standards.

Re:Lucid

[EEPROMS]

7 months and I am still trying to get Vista working lol, thank god my main machine runs Linux without the random freeze ups that windows gives me every time something complex has to be done.

for pay software

[deathguppie]

I for one have been awaiting the day when free and non-free software could mix and mingle in a safe environment free from the nasty comments and glares of those who would have us stay separated..

Re:for pay software

[tomhudson]

I for one have been awaiting the day when free and non-free software could mix and mingle in a safe environment free from the nasty comments and glares of those who would have us stay separated..

They can - it's called WINE.

Sorry, not available on Windows :-p

Try installing one of the linux distros - they shouldn't be too hard to find. There's even one mentioned in the article summary (oops, my bad, I keep forgetting how many slashdotters don't RTFS, never mind RTFA).

Re:for pay software

[jimicus]

You could say the same thing about "Protestants and Catholics", "Muslims and Christians" or even "Theists and Atheists". For exactly the same reasons.

Re:for pay software

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine hasn't been able to load any windows app I have thrown at it.
Excuse me for not knowing esoteric line commands.

One's value in life is not a function of how many line commands one knows. It is derived from being able to DOCUMENT WHAT IS NEEDED TO KNOW.

Re:for pay software

[the_womble]

You could say the same thing about "Protestants and Catholics", "Muslims and Christians" or even "Theists and Atheists". For exactly the same reasons.

That is a really bad example. My family are all Catholic (so am I technically, but I think denominations do not matter), my wife is protestant, as are many of my friends. Some of my closest friends are atheists, and since I moved to a town that has a large Muslim population (about a quarter of the total) I have been making Muslim friends.

We all manage to get along with a minimum of glares and nasty comments, and those are rarely about religion.

If you cannot get on with people with different opinions about religion, or anything else, there is something wrong with you.

Re:for pay software

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you're white and live in a western country. How about you take that attitude and live some time in a country where white's are a minority. You can experience racism and bigotry first hand while all the people around you think "there's no problem here".

Your comment is so naive it's funny. I used to think the same way before immigrating and becoming part of the minority. People don't need a reason, simply being different is enough for them to do bad things to you.

Re:for pay software

[Elektroschock]

Wine quickly improves, it is worth to enter the package sources of the current bi-weekly releases of Wine 1.3.x.

Re:for pay software

[Elektroschock]

Well, as far as muslims are concerned we get along with them pretty well, given the history of islamic aggression against the occident.

Re:for pay software

[rueger]

Ubuntu + WINE have finally reached the point where I could drop Windows. It was a loooong time coming.

I can run MS Word and Excel with no problem - faster than on Vista actually - as well as Photoshop. Dreamweaver for some reason just won't fly, but on those rare occasions when I want it I just boot back into Vista.

Unless you rely on some fairly uncommon Windows software there really is no reason to avoid Linux.

I'm not planning on going back.

Re:for pay software

[tomhudson]

That's great. I think people should read up on WINE and why it's not like a conventional emulator or virtual machine.

I bought SimCity2k, 3000 and 4 Unlimited, but I don't play them because I don't use Windows much (this machine doesn't have Windows, my laptop does, but it's not the default OS). Maybe when I get around to updating opensuse (I downloaded the isos when they came out, but I haven't gotten around to updating my drives yet ... soon!)

Re:Linux has Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lioness.tygger.net/pics/me.gif

Is that you?

The troll has a face...
Ill just tell 4chan that you've been throwing cats in trash bins.

I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Sloppy]

Ubuntu 10.04 has got to be the most fragile Linux I've used in ten years. Are there any filesystems that can't be mounted? Then NO BOOT FOR YOU!

I'll admit I like how fast it boots when ureadahead works, but I'm willing to wait an extra minute for the boot to finish, if that means I actually do get to boot instead of having to boot from a rescue CD and comment-out or "noauto" the problem filesystem in fstab.

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Ethanol-fueled]

Yep. That's why I recommend 10.04 to my friends and run 9.10 myself.

Guinea pigs, you see. HeheheehHAHAHAHAHAH!

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[mikael_j]

For me ureadahead just crashes and then the boot continues anyway. But hey, at least it sort of works (and it's not like I'm running it on any important systems).

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[De Lemming]

For those who don't know ureadahead, there's a good explanation by the developer on the Ubuntu forums.

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[SheeEttin]

Ubuntu 10.04 has got to be the most fragile Linux I've used in ten years. Are there any filesystems that can't be mounted? Then NO BOOT FOR YOU!

I don't know what you're doing to break it, but I can't think of any scenario where this would happen. Are you putting needless filesystems in your fstab?

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Yetihehe]

Do you have a better way to automount a removable disk always in a folder with custom name?

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Jugalator]

> comment-out or "noauto" the problem filesystem in fstab.

I don't intend to be a troll, but this is why I'm on a Mac and OS X as my personally perferred desktop *nix system. :-/

Seriously - why is this a bug in 10.04? Shouldn't their QA process catch these things? Like, in 2005?

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[mischi_amnesiac]

Whenever I unplug a drive and start Kubuntu, it just says that it can't mount one of the drives. Then I have the option to skip mounting that drive and boot or try to mount it manually. Don't know, why that isn't the case with your PC.

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Cato]

Yes - give the removable disk's partition a name - if it's ext3, use something like "e2fslabel /dev/sdg1 DRIVENAME" where the DRIVENAME is the name you want to use. Then you should find that GNOME will auto-mount your drive under /media/DRIVENAME, and it will appear in the Nautilus file explorer as well.

For NTFS drives, use ntfslabel with same syntax, and for FAT32, use "mlabel drive:label" - you will of course need to replace the 'g' in sdg1 above with whatever your drive uses (dmesg | tail -22 just after connecting your drive should tell you).

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive for a more complete HOWTO.

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[DaVince21]

If ureadahead fails, it will just use the old boot method. If that somehow doesn't work for you, you should consider filing a bug about this at Canonical. Stability depends for a large part on user feedback.

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Sloppy]

Er, what's a "needless filesystem?" I do go a little "Gentoo ricerboy" when it comes to my hierarchy ("this directory is reiser on RAID0, but this needs to be JFS on 2-disk RAID1 and I'm really paranoid about this so it's ext3 on 4-drive RAID1") but it's all stuff I want and I'm used to being able to do this kind of thing (and FWIW, Ubuntu mostly handles it well too, just as long as they all successfully mount).

Re:I hope they fixed or tossed ureadahead

[Sloppy]

Other people have already filed the bug report. The only message you see is something like "ureadahead-other exited with status -4" and nothing else gets logged (when you later rescue the system and can actually look at log files) and all I've found in the Ubuntu forums is a ureadahead developer saying the -4 message isn't a bug (and that boot process should continue as normal) and a bunch of other people whining that their system doesn't boot and the ureadahead message is the last thing they see before the computer just stops.

And FWIW the problem doesn't happen as long as everything is successfully mountable, which is what 99.99% of people experience all the time anyway. But yeah, Ubuntu seems to be blowing the reports off, and since there aren't any more diagnostic messages when it happens, I can understand that. But that doesn't make me trust ureadahead very much so I'd rather have a system without it.

Maybe this time...

[sockman]

Dual monitor support will work correctly... oh wait, no that's an X issue.
I won't have to monkey with my audio drivers again... doubtful.
Windows won't randomly grab focus when I'm moving another window... (this is the weirdest issue from 10.04 I've ever seen)
I can get correct output to a television via DVI... ah crap nope still gotta monkey with the X config... but in MS Windows it just works.

Seriously, I run Ubuntu on 4 different machines and I'm tired of continually fucking with all of the settings.

Re:Maybe this time...

[jedidiah]

> I can get correct output to a television via DVI... ah crap nope still gotta monkey with the X config... but in MS Windows it just works.

Never had this problem. Perhaps you should use a better video card, one that would actually be the recommended one for Windows even.

Re:Maybe this time...

[The Good Reverend]

No mod points, so I'll reply.

Those are my biggest "sigh, Windows does it better" issues too. Windows did duel monitors right almost 10 years ago, so it always shocks me when it just never works right in Ubuntu. Little things like audio shouldn't be a problem either, but they are for me, especially on my laptop.

These are the kinds of things that need fixing first if Ubuntu (and Linux) ever wants to be taken seriously.

Re:Maybe this time...

[jedidiah]

ALSA certainly should not require obscure module tweaks. That's just not appropriate for the "target market".

OTOH, Dual monitor support is neither here nor there. There's probably loads of much more relevant stuff to focus on.

As much as certain people like to whine about this, it's obscure and geeky. Most people don't even know it's possible.

Re:Maybe this time...

[sockman]

7300LE and 8800GT aren't good enough?

Seriously, I *always* have to tweak modelines and shit, and yes I'm sure it's the television I have, but in Windows it at least looks "OK" out of the box.

Re:Maybe this time...

[sockman]

7300LE and 8800GT aren't good enough?

Seriously, I *always* have to tweak modelines and shit, and yes I'm sure it's the television I have, but in Windows it at least looks "OK" out of the box.

P.S. Also, you are the exact Linux user that makes the community fucked. "It works for me, maybe you're a moron and your hardware sucks" is not a very good response. I thought Linux was supposed to be able to run on *anything* right?

Re:Maybe this time...

[CFBMoo1]

"I won't have to monkey with my audio drivers again... doubtful."

That always bugs me when I install a release of their software. It has issues and I have to dork around with audio settings. On a side note, Netbook Remix doesn't seem to have any problems with Audio like the regular desktop version did for me. I'm not sure of all the differences but it seemed to me they got it right in Remix and are still trying to figure it out in the main versions.

Re:Maybe this time...

[emh203]

I have 4 monitors on my machine (2x 9500 GT cards). Took be 5 minutes to get setup in Windows. Still have to find a X configuration that works on all 4. It should not take a day of searching through forums, etc to get multiple to work in any distro.. Multi-monitor setups are not that uncommon and I think this points to a problem with X architecture has not kept up.

Re:Maybe this time...

[linuxpyro]

Is that with Lucid? Not trying to pull a "I don't have this problem, so it must be you" thing here, but on my laptop with Lucid I've connected many an external monitor by just plugging it in and using the Monitors utility in the Preferences menu. Once or twice I've gotten a weird result, like weird resolution or the monitors getting switched, but that's pretty rare. Usually it works pretty well. My laptop's using an Intel graphics chipset, and that may have something to do with it, I'm not sure. I used to run Lucid on my Desktop with an nVidia card, and the process of adding a second monitor was pretty much similar.

I find it interesting how it seems sometimes one Ubuntu install will go smoothly with most things working, and then another will screw up on a similar set of hardware. Right now the biggest issue I'm running into is suspend to ram, which simply shuts my laptop down. Other than that though things are fine for the most part.

Re:Maybe this time...

[the_womble]

I thought Linux was supposed to be able to run on *anything* right?

Linux is supposed to be able to run on a fairly wide range of supported hardware, not everything.

I do not buy hardware unless I think confident that it will work with Linux (no exhaustive research, just quick checking) and almost everything has been fully functional out of the box, and I have exactly one serious problem (laptop sound needed a config file edited to work, and it took a lot of Googling to find the fix - when I reinstalled to swtich distro six months later it worked out of the box.).

Re:Maybe this time...

[Beelzebud]

X was designed in the 70's and it's really really showing its age.

Re:Maybe this time...

[psbrogna]

Depends on the specifics but sometimes video and, more often, wireless cards, functionality is hampered by lack of vendor participation in Linux driver development.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Have Brain Will Rent]

This is my gripe about Ubuntu and much open source or "free" software. Ok, first, yes, it's free, so I have no right to complain. Second here's my complaint: they keep putting in effort in places that really don't seem important while neglecting those that do matter. A possibly non-Ubuntu specific example from this month. I upgraded to 10.04 which brought in a newer Thunderbird. This Thunderbird places its user directory in a different directory than the version I was using then makes a symlink to there from the old location. Result Beagle no longer works on TBird mail. I *really* liked Beagle's mail treatment. So now I either have to learn how to remake Beagle (and learn to use Mono?) or remake TBird. Beagle is no longer supported and Tracker doesn't do what I want. So I'm in for some significant work either way just because somebody wanted to change the name of a directory.

And yes dual monitor support is a little screwy too... it's something I expect to "just work" in this day and age. And even ignoring the button placement the default theme just looks terrible with TBird (folders with new mail are de-emphasized???) and some other apps so I have to go looking through themes to find something I want... more work because someone screwed around with something that didn't need changing.

Most people have better things to do with their time than try to overcome the effects of tinkerers with too much time on their hands. I'm getting to the point of either finding another distribution to use or abandoning Linux altogether.

Re:Maybe this time...

[kullnd]

I just broke down and loaded linux (ubuntu) on my wife and kid's computers because I got tired of reloading windows every time they downloaded every virus available on the internet.

- Although I did not run into the issues that you are stating, my wife is currently upset that her iPod got wiped and after doing a days worth of troubleshooting for some reason I can not get her iPod to work with anything in Linux, there has been some other issues with other things just not working properly that most users want to "just work"...

That being said, I was very impressed with how much stuff DID work out of the box, I did not have to hunt down any drivers for the laptop or desktop that I loaded, WiFi, Sound, Graphics, everything was perfect on install.

It's getting close, and I look forward to when i can actually load this and not have to tweak everything all of the time and, like windows, it will just work with the stuff that normal computer users expect their computers to do on a day to day basis.

Re:Maybe this time...

[tenco]

OTOH, Dual monitor support is neither here nor there. There's probably loads of much more relevant stuff to focus on.

As much as certain people like to whine about this, it's obscure and geeky. Most people don't even know it's possible.

Even clerks are getting dual screen setups nowadays. They are certainly not obscure or geeky anymore.

Regarding your sig: Nope. The SI is meant to be practical for physics and everyday usage for measuring properties of the physical world. Use KiB from the apropriate IEC standard already and stop confusing others.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I will provide the anti-anec to your dote.

On my eMachines e250 netbook (basically a rebranded Acer Aspire One with bigger HDD and wireless N card), dual monitors works flawlessly on Ubuntu. I have to go into System > Preferences > Monitors to turn another display on/off, but it works beautifully and lets me reposition the displays anywhere I need to make a usable work environment.

On the Win7 Starter that came on this thing, I have yet to get dual monitors working at ALL, and I'm fairly certain it will never happen. I'm not sure if the generic graphics chip can handle both Win7 (Starter doesn't even have Aero included, and requires a hack to even CHANGE THE EFFING WALLPAPER) and another display at once.

Every single thing I do works better on Ubuntu than on Windows. Opening Firefox (with the same add-ons, homepage and everything) takes at least 3x longer on Win7 than on Ubuntu. Even running Baldur's Gate on WINE works better than running Baldur's Gate on 7, though I'll chalk that up to being an ancient game rather than a detriment to 7.

Note I'm speaking of 10.04.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

But you *are* a moron, and your hardware *does* suck. Stop blaming others for your own incompetence, or stick to using Windows.

Re:Maybe this time...

[turbidostato]

"here's my complaint: they keep putting in effort in places that really don't seem important"

Correction: ...that don't seem important... TO YOU.

"while neglecting those that do matter."

Correction: ...while neglecting those that do matter... TO YOU.

Now: Do you really think those people are putting efforts on things that don't matter to THEM while neglecting things that do matter TO THEM?

So, what are you doing in order to align THEIR insterests to YOURS? Are you throwing money at it or something?

Because surely you don't expect they will neglect THEIR INTERESTS in order to support YOUR INTERESTS just out of thin air, do you?

Re:Maybe this time...

[drinkypoo]

Between my TV (sharp aquos LC-UN series) and whatever computer if I plug into its VGA I have to force resolution whether we are talking about windows or Linux but if I plug into it via HDMI then I get proper resolution support.

the problem between windows and linux is often an EDID version issue, either the Windows driver is smart enough to combine the 1.x and 2.x EDIDs or the Linux driver is not smart enough to use the 2.x EDID, those are the typical problems. but this really boils down to the TV manufacturer not properly creating the EDIDs, which are supposed to have identical information in them regardless of the version, with simply more information in the 2.x EDID. The fallback 1.x EDID is required by the 2.x specification to at minimum include the maximum resolution of the display!

Re:Maybe this time...

[Have Brain Will Rent]

Well the first part of your reply is rather obvious - I assumed most readers would understand that was all implied. As for:

So, what are you doing in order to align THEIR insterests to YOURS? Are you throwing money at it or something? Because surely you don't expect they will neglect THEIR INTERESTS in order to support YOUR INTERESTS just out of thin air, do you?

I have no idea what their interests are so I have no idea what I might do to align their interests with mine. I might guess that part of their interest is in seeing Ubuntu used and adopted. In which case I have helped by giving feedback from a user. People who understand marketing also know that for every person who bothers to complain about something there are many more who have the same complaint but are silent about it. So they might even speculate that many people have the same complaint I do.

And, while it is unfortunate that you seem so perturbed by my having a few negative comments to make there really is no need to SHOUT.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Hognoxious]

Windows did duel monitors

With swords or pistols?

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, jedidiah is a well-known pompous twit with very little actual technical knowledge but a whole lot of opinions. Ignore.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I've had a lot of issues with multi-monitor setup. The core of X is pretty sound, but we lost 10 years in the 90s when it was under the X consortium where they did nothing so we're still paying catch up. Xorg is moving quite fast since it was split off. Let's give it a year (that's two Friedman units) and see where we are. sri

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing you don't have an nVidia video card.

Try it, there is no point using anything else. I have been 100% nVidia for the last 10 years for this reason alone, they work the best with Linux.

Re:Maybe this time...

[hedwards]

Windows does it alright. Personally, I prefer the way that OpenSUSE does it with the snap to monitor boundaries or the way that I've got my FreeBSD X set up so that they're completely separate X servers.

Re:Maybe this time...

[eugene ts wong]

I totally agree with you. Yes, these things are important "to us", but we're not talking about coffee preferences. We're talking about functionality and usability, which are very important to a lot of people.

Re:Maybe this time...

[CronoCloud]

Yes, I have the same issue with EDID over VGA to an LCD TV. Had to create a custom resolution in the nvidia config tool on Windows and add a mode line to xorg.conf on Linux.

Re:Maybe this time...

[sp0tter]

seconded. Ive done dual monitors on Ubuntu on far too many configurations to recount and have had nothing but blinding success in all cases. Cant comment on MS configurations since I don't bother with them anymore.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

And you are the exact user that the "community" doesn't need. Contributing nothing but whining and complaints. Totally unwilling to learn anything or put in any effort, yet expecting developers to drop everything they are doing and hold your hand.

Just get a Mac. We'll all be much happier.

Re:Maybe this time...

[shutdown -p now]

Never had this problem. Perhaps you should use a better video card

Why is this always the ultimate answer to all Linux hardware problems from the zealot crowd? "Oh, your hardware is crap. Go buy good one!". With "good" implicitly defined as "works in Linux". Well, my hardware doesn't work in Linux, but works just fine in quite a few other OSes. Why do neither Windows nor FreeBSD have any problem whatsoever with my wireless card, but Linux (any distro... went through 5 in the last 6 months) can only list networks and not connect since new (read: broken) Ralink drivers were put into mainstream kernel? Why both Windows and FreeBSD can switch sound from speakers to headphones when the latter are plugged in, but Linux cannot (and I can't be bothered to find out if the problem is the mess that is ALSA, or the mess that is PulseAudio)?

Don't give me that "crappy hardware" line. It's getting as tiresome as suggestion to reboot whenever there is a problem with Windows. How about actually fixing shit (or, at least, not breaking shit that is already there and works)?

Re:Maybe this time...

[DaVince21]

Aren't the video problems related to the video drivers rather than Ubuntu specifically? Granted, they're still problems, but you're naming problems now that will be like that on any Linux distro using your hardware (unless something has been fixed in the drivers at this point, in which case one of your problems would be fixed too).

Re:Maybe this time...

[Thing 1]

Seriously, I *always* have to tweak modelines and shit

I was similarly warned about tweaking modelines by my proctologist. (Or perhaps, "Tweaking modelines does tend to lead to indigestion." I'm not sure either are very good, although I did follow the rule about putting the twist in the last word...)

Re:Maybe this time...

[Thing 1]

OT to your OT: KiB is just geeks getting back at marketers. I lived through it, and still find it ridiculous (and unfortunately, I now cannot spend my money on a hard drive whose manufacturer uses the original well-defined terms). Seriously, it's domain-specific knowledge, which scientists know all about.

And actually looking back at the posts, it appears that the two of you are stating the same thing ("should use KiB"). And furthermore, the OS (original sig) says SI units should be "computationally convenient", which for computers is powers of two, so it all worked out nicely back in the 80s/early 90s; then the hard drive manufacturers decided they could "compete" on larger capacity by breaking the standard, and using SI units instead of the already well-defined computer-specific notation.

But I fear that people will never agree on this; some people think overly globally, and others this overly locally.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Thing 1]

OTOH, Dual monitor support is neither here nor there. There's probably loads of much more relevant stuff to focus on.

As much as certain people like to whine about this, it's obscure and geeky. Most people don't even know it's possible.

Like the other response mentioned, dual monitors are becoming increasingly popular, and run by secretaries.

I myself have a second, dark monitor, which I'd like to light up at some point soon. Worked on Windows, but I'm trying to transition the household over to Linux. This is one sticking point; unfortunately it's not the only one, but it's definitely not "obscure and geeky", it's becoming mainstream. Like Linux, kicking and screaming. :)

Re:Maybe this time...

[bingoUV]

That's right. But just curious - why do you use linux then? Or read Slashdot stories about linux?

Re:Maybe this time...

[walshy007]

Although I did not run into the issues that you are stating, my wife is currently upset that her iPod got wiped and after doing a days worth of troubleshooting for some reason I can not get her iPod to work with anything in Linux,

How old is the ipod and/or when was it last attached to itunes? about when the third gen shuffles came out apple pushed new firmwares to the devices that screwed up syncing and the like. I use gtkpod on a second gen shuffle and it works a treat. Same with some nanos I sync for people sometimes.

As for not having to tweak everything all the time, it is already better than windows, with the lack of hunting for drivers and separately installing office/firefox/thunderbird/dev environments etc etc.

Not sure about you but it takes me days to weeks to stop having to find and install things as I need them on a new windows machine, as opposed to having everything I need from the get go on a proper size custom install like from the fedora full dvd images.

Re:Maybe this time...

[shutdown -p now]

I've been using it since 2002, for a few years even as a primary OS. I don't use it much these days - mostly to play with Lisp and Go - but I feel it's like with programming languages and frameworks: even if you only really use one or two, it helps if you know many more so that you can reasonably compare, and apply useful techniques learned from exotic stuff elsewhere (e.g. with PowerShell now in default Win7/Win2008R2 install, those Unix shell programming skulks come in handy). And, of course, so that you know your switching options if your primary choice is no longer attractive.

Re:Maybe this time...

[pinkushun]

It's tricky for any *nix kernel driver hacker to write GPU code when the hardware is locked and proprietary, and these hardware vendors only offered official Windows drivers.

See Intel for example, are now working to open the hardware, these details were never available to anyone wanting to write driver code back then, so *nix got a little behind on the GPU side.

I recon in about 5 years that would have changed a great deal.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's the standard answer because by definition they're zealots. Nobody sane bothers with desktop Linux.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had trouble with that kind of things too... until I realised that they just can't fix the important issues, so they keep things changing to simulate progress. Rearrange the furniture, but the house still has no foundations.

I quit using Linux, of course, after many years of denial and unfulfilled promises.

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never had this problem. Perhaps you should use a better video card

Why is this always the ultimate answer to all Linux hardware problems from the zealot crowd?

Because that's what they yell at their mums from the basement...as well as "It works for me!(tm)"

Re:Maybe this time...

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf? - as I speak i have windows from 20+ machines from 3 continents running GUI apps, and quite a few more "terminals" doing server-based CLI stuff from even more obscure locations. it a win-win for payday (excuse my pun)
So, your preferred alternative is more capable I assume?

Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945.

[Zombie Ryushu]

One of the problems I have with this is the fact that as of Version 2.10 of the Intel driver, kernel Mode setting is mandatory. When I upgraded from Jaunty to Lucid, thats when first Kernel Mode Setting became available, and you had to disable it in /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf

But the only reason I was able to do that is because version 2.9 still retains the older User Mode Setting method that avoids the flicker. As of 2.10, Intel's drivers require Kernel mode setting. I use S-video to connect my Laptop to my TV. when using Kernel mode setting, my display was garbled flicker city, when using User mode setting, it worked fine. This is a serious bug for anyone using the Intel chips.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems I have with this is the fact that as of Version 2.10 of the Intel driver, kernel Mode setting is mandatory. When I upgraded from Jaunty to Lucid, thats when first Kernel Mode Setting became available, and you had to disable it in /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf

But the only reason I was able to do that is because version 2.9 still retains the older User Mode Setting method that avoids the flicker. As of 2.10, Intel's drivers require Kernel mode setting. I use S-video to connect my Laptop to my TV. when using Kernel mode setting, my display was garbled flicker city, when using User mode setting, it worked fine. This is a serious bug for anyone using the Intel chips.

Use "i915.powersave=0" as a boot parameter in Grub. It should fix it.

Speedier verson of Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

They replaced it with Gmail?

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[IANAAC]

I'm still on 10.04, but managed to get the latest version (2.30) of Evolution through another ppa.

It really is faster. And more stable too (although I had never experienced the crashes some had with 2.28).

They've also changed up the interface a bit with updated icons - it no longer looks like something out of 1998.

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[leromarinvit]

They replaced it with Gmail?

No, from what I heard /usr/bin/evulution is now a symlink to /usr/bin/mutt.

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[tokul]

It really is faster.

There is no way to make it faster, if they continue to use same f...ed up mailbox format for storage.

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[IANAAC]

Truthfully, I know nothing about the exact mailbox format, but I know they're sqlite 3 databases. In any other app I've used that utilizes sqlite (2/3) databases, I've never found them to be slow.

That said, my evolution's mailboxes aren't too terribly large (about 15K messages each in two different mail accounts).

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[tokul]

I've never found them to be slow.

2 GB limit per mailbox
Repeated mailbox index corruptions
Slow performance when mailboxes are locked and indexed
I guess your 15K messages are small ones. My users hit 2GB limit with less than 5K messages.

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution is a piece of shit, I don't know why GNOME pushes it instead of Thunderbird. I mean they use Firefox, why not Thunderbird.

Re:Speedier verson of Evolution

[bingoUV]

GNOME's official browser is epiphany, not firefox. Mozilla products don't fit in with GNOME philosophy.

Re:SO IS THIS STILL HAVE THE SAME PRIVACY PROBLEMS

[IB4Student]

When you install it, you have the option to not install any non F/OSS components.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Zombie Ryushu]

Incorrect. Use "i915.modeset=0"

Release early, release often.

[khasim]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

It allows (in theory) for the faster development of the system. The new code goes through a short testing cycle and gets out into the public twice a year.

No matter how much effort you put into testing, it always seems like the majority of the bugs are only found once it is released.

Re:Release early, release often.

[eldridgea]

Also, the LTS releases (every 18 months) are the ones aimed at production environments like offices and servers, so if you're on that cycle you have huge numbers testing the new features that came out between LTS releases before you get them.

Re:Release early, release often.

[Kjella]

Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?

If it was just the OS, not so much. But it also includes all the applications and there's always some applications that have had huge upgrades in the last six months. You can maybe find some backports in a PPA somewhere or try rolling your own but by far the easiest is if your distro has packaged it. The same goes if you want support for new hardware as most drivers live in the kernel, again you can find a newer kernel for an old distro but it's a bit complicated.

Being on a six month cycle is by far not the most experimental you get, six months is a loooong feedback loop if you're actually interested in what a project is doing and want to file bug reports and feature requests and in general keep up with the development. A six month release cycle fits well for those of us that are interested in new stuff, but don't want to deal with changes on a day to day basis like those on rolling distros. The LTS fits for those that more want to use it, but don't expect any developer to get excited about a bug he fixed upstream a year and a half ago...

Whooosh

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you hear the sound of that "whooosh" over in Europe?

Sadly, with Ubuntu, one thing is perpetual

[bogaboga]

Ugliness! Now Say I am a troll but default Ubuntu is ugly and therefore not pleasing to the eyes. When one slaps another desktop environment on it, things get appreciably better.

Re:Sadly, with Ubuntu, one thing is perpetual

[LingNoi]

You're a troll, people have been saying this since the first Ubuntu started. It's an old and boring complaint. No one cares about what colour you think the bike shed should be.

Re:Sadly, with Ubuntu, one thing is perpetual

[bogaboga]

It's not about the color...it's the theme...the feel and the technologies behind it. Compare the latest GNOME to the latest KDE or Windows 7 or even OSX then tell me which looks better.

Re:Sadly, with Ubuntu, one thing is perpetual

[LingNoi]

You seem to misunderstand what I mean by colour of the bikeshed. You're talking about trivial crap that everyone has a different opinion on.

Re:Sadly, with Ubuntu, one thing is perpetual

[bogaboga]

You're talking about trivial crap that everyone has a different opinion on.

Just like pretty much everything that should matter and to what extent.

Conclusion: You represent an irrelevant conclusion".

I'll pass again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll pass again this time around... glad they don't make cars, they'd be swapping the gas pedal and brake. Maybe reverse the steering.

Re:I'll pass again...

[amn108]

I don't think your analogy is appropriate. Arguably, they should give users preferences, which is different from a car. Car is hardware, the pedal is at one place, the brake at another. If these don't suit you, because you learned to drive with different combination of pedal placements, you are right - it's a disaster of proportions. However, a user account is personal, and placement of buttons is not a problem since these are personal preference - some people DO prefer buttons in different places than what's usual for you - the problem is in having and keeping a personal user account, no matter what car you drive. With cars, it's a pipe dream - I mean you take the wheel of your friends weird vehicle with swapped pedals, the car does not care that it's you not the friend driving, and it for sure won't accomodate the pedals for you. With software however, it's expected, just as it is expected that when you click a link, you may want Firefox, while your friend would want Internet Explorer. So there. My point is - sometimes car analogies suck.

Re:I'll pass again...

[Dekker3D]

Enter drive-by-wire. I can't wait!

A few thoughts

[TejWC]

I have been using Kubuntu 10.10 for the last 2 weeks. Some impressions:

• Still haven't fixed a number of dual screen bugs :(. Sad because Fedora 13 fixed them in their KDE.
• I didn't like how KDE 4.5 changed the buttons so I had to change the coloring system back to KDE 4.4 style
• Lots of updates; every day!
• Rekonq still crashes each time I go to google maps. Latest git commit crashes on startup so Kubuntu guys can't do much about it yet
• Qt 4.7 is awesome. It seems fairly stable despite not being released yet.
• R600 open source driver still has issues with KDE's window manager (in terms of performance). At least its a little faster. Also, they fixed all the issues it has with Blender3D!

Re:A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

10.04 also gets a lot of updates, almost daily, even though the list of packages I have installed on the wife's unr laptop is pretty small. Is ubuntu's qa really going down the drain?

Re:A few thoughts

[LingNoi]

Yes it is in order to meet their stupid release deadlines. As an example copying CDs to a file was broken in the default install of Lucid. Not sure if it's been fixed yet for maverick or even lucid, haven't had time to check.

Re:A few thoughts

[Knuckles]

10.04 also gets a lot of updates, almost daily, even though the list of packages I have installed on the wife's unr laptop is pretty small. Is ubuntu's qa really going down the drain?

Since 10.04.1 was released 3 weeks ago, updates are nearly exclusively security updates mandated by upstreams. And I, personally, appreciated that they fixed a lot of bugs up to 10.04.1. What else should they do, not fix bugs, so that other ACs can scream LTSes suck because what's broken stays broken?

Re:A few thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

> Lots of updates; every day!

I have been using Ubuntu at work for the last 2 weeks as well, and this is driving me crazy. For this reason I could never use Ubuntu on my notebook, because I have an expensive connection and it would cost me too much.

In addition, one more thing is driving me crazy. When I copy (say) a 0.5 Gb file on my USB pen, the bar shows me that it has copied the first 0.3 Gb instantly, then it freezes, and then it completes instantly when the file is copied. What's the use of a bar, then? It would be totally equivalent to have a window just saying "I am copying", with no info at all on the time expected for the process to complete.

Re:A few thoughts

[blackpaw]

Rekonq still crashes each time I go to google maps. Latest git commit crashes on startup

Probably an issue with restoring the session, try deleting ".kde/share/apps/rekonq/session"

Upgrade or Full install...

[Brad1138]

I have been using Ubuntu since 6.04, and really like it. However usually when I try to upgrade from 1 version to the next it crashes and I end up just installing the new version from scratch. Hope it is different this time.

Re:Upgrade or Full install...

[LVSlushdat]

I've also been on Ubuntu since 2006 with the 6.06 release, which was their first LTS .. I only upgrade when the following LTS comes out, so I was on 8.04 until very recently. Just went out and bought a new 160GB system drive (and a new 1TB drive data drive to replace the old 500GB) for the main desktop and a 500GB for the laptop and did clean installs of 10.04 on both systems. I *tried* to upgrade 6.06 to 8.04... was not pretty... Now I do clean installs.

Re:Upgrade or Full install...

[bheerssen]

Ubuntu installs so fast, I tend to try the upgrade process first, figuring 'what the hell, may as well try it.' In my case, 10.04 was the very first time an upgrade actually worked. I was pleasantly surprised.

Re:Upgrade or Full install...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu 6.04 have never been released, it was 6.06 that year

Re:Upgrade or Full install...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just yesterday had to reinstall Ubuntu on parents PC. Started from 9.04 and did the upgrade twice afterwards. No problems at all.

Re:Upgrade or Full install...

[sourcerror]

I've just done a partial upgrade from 9.10 (security fixes mostly, I guess), and nothing is broken yet.

Re:Upgrade or Full install...

[Brad1138]

That is correct, forgot they weren't always .4 or .10. I looked back and my first disc is labeled 6.06.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Sponge Bath]

Use "i915.modeset=0"

Ubuntu! Bringing Linux to grandma's desktop today!

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[linuxpyro]

It depends. In my case, if my parent's computer messes up, I'm the one they call for tech support anyways, no matter what the OS.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[domatic]

It's no worse than doing a regedit import which I've had to do to fix presumably Grandma-ready Windows issues.

Canonical's priorities

[McTickles]

Canonical seriously needs to reconsider their priorities... Before throwing in more useless "wizbang" perhaps they should stabilize packages, keep them more up to date and dont rush releases out every 6 months... Perhaps there ought to be 2 massive versions: desktop and server. the packages are always updated to the latest builds and no more releases just 1 install and you can keep up to date forever no need to reinstall.

Re:Canonical's priorities

[Beelzebud]

What you just described is basically a rolling release distro. Try Arch Linux or Gentoo. Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distro. If it's not doing what you like, you should check other ones out.

Re:Canonical's priorities

[Haeleth]

Sounds like you want Debian Unstable.

The name contains a subtle hint as to what happens if you always update packages to the latest builds instead of performing careful testing of scheduled releases.

Re:Canonical's priorities

[Abcd1234]

I dunno, unstable is pretty good most of the time. Yes, because it's "unstable", it gets things like major Xorg updates, etc, which can break things for a while, but if you're willing to scan the changelogs before doing a distro update (yes, you actually have to do a bit of diligence), its actually pretty solid.

Re:Canonical's priorities

[Dcnjoe60]

Much of the "wizbang" Ubuntu releases are from upstream versions of gnome. I guess they could use the most stable packages, but then how would they fulfill your wish to be more up to date? There is a server version -- you install it from the alternate cd. Usually, it is only the desktop environment and applications that get the new features. Things like apache, etc. seem to be pretty stable on ubuntu. For the utmost in control, you could just install the command-line version, then download and compile what ever apps you want so that you can choose what you want. If that is too much work, then you you shouldn't complain about the packaging choices that the ubunutu (or any other distro) have made on your behalf.

Re:Canonical's priorities

[FoolishOwl]

First, they have long term support (LTS) distributions every two years -- 10.04 is the current distribution, and also an LTS distribution. Second, they already have desktop distributions and server distributions.

Re:Canonical's priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Rolling releases sound great, but I'm under the impression that Arch Linux and Gentoo would both require a lot more time and effort to maintain than Ubuntu? I mean, presumably one of the advantages of a rolling release is that you get *relatively* up-to-date (not necessarily bleeding-edge) packages without having to spend the time and effort in reinstalling all the time, even if you have the skills to do so - but would Arch or Gentoo require lots of time and effort for things like upgrading existing packages, i.e. for maintaining the system? Are there any rolling release distros out there which require similar levels of effort to maintain than say Ubuntu?

Re:Canonical's priorities

[Risen888]

I'm under the impression that Arch Linux and Gentoo would both require a lot more time and effort to maintain than Ubuntu?
Not in my experience (about 3 years of using Ubuntu, switched to Arch back in '08 because the KDE packages are so much nicer). It would be more accurate to say that Arch requires a lot more time to configure,as you're starting from much closer to scratch. Probably took me a month or two to really get it just right, but since that day it's been as close to "no maintenance required" as you're ever gonna see.

You will have to learn stuff and read stuff because Arch doesn't hold your hand like Ubuntu does (which is not a value judgment, just a difference in styles), but if you are willing to do that the rewards are great.

fan control ?

[socheres]

i wonder if it has some acpi fan control for my lenovo s10
i am forced to use windows xp especially late at night in bed as some user has written a hack for windows that corrects the acpi temperature values so my lil' laptop wont sound like a boeing...
i tried several linux hacks including but not limited to lmsensors and thinkfan but they don't work for me :(

Dept. of Redundancy Department

[Anonymous Coward]

The release announcement boasts faster boot times

Does it also boast cooler CPU temperatures and louder sound volumes?

Re:Disappointing

[Anonymous Coward]

We geeks may not be very good at marketing, but even we know that code name wouldn't go over well with our families and co-workers.

Stablize AND latest version?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland. A nice coffee, both stimulating and caffeine free.

Re:Stablize AND latest version?

[Kjella]

Right sir, I get right on it. I will make the packages BOTH cutting edge AND give them proven stabilty. While I am at it, how about I make you nice curry sir, both spicy yet bland.

I think grandparent is asking for a free pony too, but it's not quite as absurd as it sounds. Ubuntu takes a snapshot every six months and some packages are always in a half-broken state as they're rewriting things. If you think of product quality a of a graph it goes like /^\_/^\_/^\_/^\ where the tops are releases and bottoms the bleeding edge releases in between. Sometimes it really is such that you could go backwards or forwards and both would be better than whatever point Ubuntu froze at. The number of backports is quite low, mostly they abandon the old and start working on the next release.

At times I've wanted a "top-hop" distribution with a release window. Not rolling, not snapshot but a distro that would pick major releases in the last 1-6 months and stay on their bugfix branches until a new release is out, and make it easy to separate between bugfix upgrades and real upgrades. However, it would take a lot more overhead in setting up the distro as you'd need someone managing each package and identifying which releases are worth it, a system of stable branches and so on.

Re:Stablize AND latest version?

[dinker]

And how about putting the window close button back on the right-hand side while you`re at it.

Re:Stablize AND latest version?

[FoolishOwl]

How about choosing one of the several desktop themes, installed by default, that have the buttons on the right side? My eight-year-old figured out how to do that within a minute.

Re:Disappointing

[LingNoi]

The codes aren't suppose to classify slashdot users..

looking forward to a future Ubuntu without upstart

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora 14 is getting rid of upstart (replacing it with a more sane systemd).
I look forward to Ubuntu doing the same. I may give Fedora another shot in the mean time.

XRANDR

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that the Nvidia drivers don't support XRANDR which seems to be the standard way to do multi-monitor in Open Source drivers these days. I've never tried with >2 monitors, but I've never had trouble when using two monitors on the Open Source Radeon driver which uses XRANDR.

Well done, you rascal...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were gay, I'd ask you to have my baby. Which is somewhat impossible, but you get my drift. Alas, I'm not. But I thought I'd encourage you to post similar comments to smart-asses in the foreseeable future. Of which I'm not sure I succeeded, but it's the thought that counts, as they say. Also, I assumed (considering the particular forum you're posting) that you're male. Which you might not be, but then I'd certainly would have you gestate my babies...

ATI close-source driver

[DoofusOfDeath]

Anyone know then Ubuntu 10.10 will make available the close-source ATI driver?

Re:ATI close-source driver

[sourcerror]

Even 9.10 offered that (fglrx), but it completely crashed my system, even after removing the package fglrx.

Re:ATI close-source driver

[Asm-Coder]

I have an ATI card, and I've been able to switch between the closed source driver and the open source driver with every release. Although I wouldn't know why you would want to use the closed source driver... It has stablity issues, and I although I try each of them when I upgrade, it's been some time (~2 years) since the closed source driver could do anything better than the open driver. (about 2 years ago I couldn't get the open source driver to play video and desktop effects at the same time, but I solved that with a script that turned off desktop effects everytime I started mplayer.)

LTS releases

[MollyB]

My experience has been positive with both Dapper Drake and Hardy Heron. I still have Karmic installed on my notebook because I don't like either the new color schemes or the buttons-on-the-left. I'm annoyed at the high-handed way that Canonical treats long-time users, so I've refrained from upgrading to Lucid Lynx on the desktop until, kicking and whining, I have to next March if I'm sticking with Ubuntu. Hardy has been stable, quick and thanks to Ubuntuzilla, I've got the newest Firefox. I'm also using ALSA, not PulseAudio, but have no issues with sound. This is a factory-installed version of Hardy Heron on a Dell desktop, btw.

I'm certainly not refuting your point; just giving the upside of less-than-perfect LTS versions. They at least shield a user from future capricious corporate folly to some extent.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Knuckles]

Because grandma will find it really important to deactivate KMS!!!

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Ant P.]

There's a workaround for 2.10 here.

Rolling out the default?

[symbolset]

If you're deploying even one unit of any OS and aren't customizing the heck out of it, you are negligent. The defaults are never appropriate. BSD may be an exception, but I don't know of any others.

Fix it!

[FoolishOwl]

Those lazy bastards should stop fixing bugs, and start fixing bugs instead!

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Anonymous Coward]

Slag Linux' desktop readiness. Instant +5 on Microshill-dot!

What's the story with Evolution?

[FoolishOwl]

The summary mentions that Evolution will be faster. Can any beta-testers report on whether it is much of an improvement?

I'd been increasingly unhappy with Evolution. It's very, very slow; it usually fails to display HTML email, which is increasingly common, and it often freezes for thirty seconds or so when I try to do it. I use Gmail and Google Calendar, but prefer to use a local client; Evolution offers integration with Google services, but that integration is clumsy. For instance, to "archive" email in my inbox, I have to click the "delete" button.

So, I finally got around to installing Thunderbird. In order to get the functionality I wanted, that I'd had in Evolution, I had to install several addons: Enigmail, Lightning, and Provider for Google Calendar. Importing contacts was a bit messy, and I haven't worked out yet how to sync Thunderbird's address book with Google Contacts. There's less thorough integration of Thunderbird into the GNOME interface.

Yet despite those difficulties, Thunderbird is much, much better at the core functions for which I'd been using Evolution: email and calendaring. It is faster, displays messages more cleanly, and integrates better with Google services.

I've been seeing complaints from Ubuntu users for years that they'd rather have Thunderbird as the default client, and that it works better than Evolution, save for the less thorough integration into GNOME. Having made the switch, I'm really at a loss why Ubuntu and GNOME are sticking with Evolution, and not at least treating Thunderbird as a peer.

Re:What's the story with Evolution?

[Undead Waffle]

I'm glad to hear that. A while ago when I was looking at the e-mail clients available I settled on Thunderbird and all this talk about Evolution made me think maybe there was something about it I missed. All I wanted was e-mail and calendar and Thunderbird + Lightning handled it quite nicely.

Re:What's the story with Evolution?

[tokul]

There's less thorough integration of Thunderbird into the GNOME interface.

http://opencoding.wordpress.com/gnomeopen/

Re:What's the story with Evolution?

[bingoUV]

1. Thunderbird is not controlled by GNOME.

2. Thunderbird does not fit in with the philosophy of GNOME.

So epiphany ends up as the official browser of GNOME and evolution as official mail client. No reason why users and distributions cannot use firefox (most do) and thunderbird (most don't) as default applications.

Re:What's the story with Evolution?

[FoolishOwl]

No reason why users and distributions cannot use firefox (most do) and thunderbird (most don't) as default applications.

That's exactly the question, though. Every Linux distribution I've tried, with a GNOME interface, installs Firefox as the default. Why is Thunderbird treated as an afterthought?

The integration I had most in mind, were two features. First, there's no link to Thunderbird in Indicator Applet, after setting Thunderbird as the default email client -- Indicator Applet still launches Evolution. I've seen instructions on how to change that, involving creating a .desktop file and so on, so it's fixable. Second, the panel clock applet, when clicked upon, displays a calendar summary, drawn from Evolution.

In both cases, these are trivial conveniences, and not worth foregoing Thunderbird, in my opinion. It'd be nice to have these fixed, though.

It's a GUI. It's easy.

[FoolishOwl]

My kids figured out how to change the default theme within seconds of their first use of GNOME.

Maybe i do not care about buttons

[siga]

Maybe they should concentrate on fixing all the bugs 10.04 has had .Also , they have resources ,so why they do not add someone to Pulse audio and Sane projects . So far many scanners are not supported and i would really like it to be able just to be able to plug in my headphones and switch from speakers to headphones just listen to my tunes like in Windows instead messing with some asoundconf crap little file . Actually ,after almost 4 years with Linux ,i went back to Windows , until Linux and Ubuntu stabilize little bit and Pulse audio matures somewhat.

YAWN!

[shinzawai]

Yaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnn

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Burpmaster]

It might be outputting video with the wrong norm. Try running 'xrandr --prop' to see the output mode, and 'xrandr --output TV1 --set mode NTSC' to change it to the North American standard, or replace NTSC with PAL for the European TV standard.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[WillDraven]

Exactly. I get so tired of the "waaaah, my grandma cant do $X without help on it" complaints. Our elders are always asking for help with their computers no matter what software is on it. If they need help, either help them, or tell them to buy a support contract (or buy one for them if you're nice and can afford it).

Eventually they'll die and wont need tech support anymore.

Soon after that technology will start confusing the shit out of you and you'll be asking your kids for help.

Get over it.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, it's a hell of a lot easier to via regedit.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Erikderzweite]

I know perfectly well what my grandma is using her PC for, I will set up everything for her anyway.
If there's a problem, I am still the one who is being asked about it, so I better use a system which doesn't break that easy.

So yeah, my grandmas* don't know what ssh with reverse forwarding is, but they have it set up so I can log on to them any time from anywhere (their PCs connect to my shell server). Important is, they can't break anything, they don't have root password. If there's an issue I can fix it in no time using ssh or (forwarded as well) vnc. Hell, they don't know what a terminal IS, that's what I'm for!

Could they install or configure an OS themselves? No. Can they use any OS I show them how to use (where the browser is, where the pictures are etc.)? Yes. Have I been bothered more often when they weren't using Linux? Hell yes!

So Linux IS grandma-ready.

*ok, my grandma doesn't have a PC, but my mom an my aunt do and technically they are grandmas.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[shutdown -p now]

So buy them an iPad.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Abcd1234]

If grandma is outputting video to a TV, and doing so over S-Video, I think she can do a google search and find and implement this little incantation.

Do they still use Empathy?

[Asaf.Zamir]

Is Empathy still the default IM client? I've installed Pidgin and I don't regret it for a second.

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[Cato]

Exactly - I have far fewer problems with an elderly relative's PC since I switched them from Windows to Linux. I use Ubuntu 8.04 which has required almost no maintenance, with a simple VNC over SSH tunnel setup so I can fix things. Linux makes it possible easy to lock down GNOME and Thunderbird (though it could be easier) so that the inevitable messing-up of system or application state can be sorted out by a restart.

Bhanu Tiwari

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first saw this column my thought was that Slashdot Linux Story's audience simply have to read this: http://hubpages.com/hub/rent-a-laptop-rentals . I can't understand renting a laptop at all! The tab of renting a laptop for only about two weeks will set you back as much as outright going online and purchasing the portable PC!

Disciple defected

[SpaghettiPattern]

I used to like Ubuntu. Easy to install, popular and working well with NFS.

But configuring NFS clients with autofs get progressively bad. First it started to get a little problematic and then it got worse and worse. 10.04 had problems starting statd and after hours spent I decided to switch back to Fedora.

I just need a distro which I can install simply and that will work with NFS and autofs. Stuff that's known to work reliably since the end of the 80s.

My experiences with 10.10

[Dennis Sheil]

Why do neither Windows nor FreeBSD have any problem whatsoever with my wireless card, but Linux (any distro... went through 5 in the last 6 months) can only list networks and not connect since new (read: broken) Ralink drivers were put into mainstream kernel?

This is the same problem I had - my RAlink card automagically worked on the 10.04 release, but broke on the 10.10 development version. I didn't have time to look into it so I put aside using 10.10 for a few months. A few weeks ago I had some time, so I looked into it and saw that the rt2860sta and rt2800pci modules conflicted, so I blacklisted rt2800pci. This was the biggest problem I encountered, and it is still there.

Other problems? Xpdf stopped working. The English language help menus are full of Unicode gibberish, which has been reported 22 times, and which 13 people say affects them (I actually figured out the fix myself - launchpad bug #605577 - they've yet to patch it, you just have to overwrite a bad yelp.po file with a good one).

Another problem - by default, switching from one workspace to another does this whooshing thing, which after a lot of switching workspaces starts to get annoying (for me at least). Turning these desktop effects off causes problems though - gnome-terminal's crash (launchpad bug #6229753) and windows from all workspaces all suddenly appear in the first workspace (launchpad bug #622582).

Well, various freezes are going into effect with 10.10, so the mucking around is ending and the fixing can really begin. Some of the bugs are harder to fix than others. Hopefully a lot of this will be fixed in the next month. I've been doing what I can, when I have the time.

Re:My experiences with 10.10

[shutdown -p now]

This is the same problem I had - my RAlink card automagically worked on the 10.04 release, but broke on the 10.10 development version. I didn't have time to look into it so I put aside using 10.10 for a few months. A few weeks ago I had some time, so I looked into it and saw that the rt2860sta and rt2800pci modules conflicted, so I blacklisted rt2800pci. This was the biggest problem I encountered, and it is still there.

That is useful tip, thank you. I'll give it a try.

Some comments here say that there are still issues with WPA, once you get that going on a basic level. We'll see.

The real headache there is that I've also got wired Ethernet card broken in Linux (Realtek 8186c, which gives me this), so I end up with no networking whatsoever. And manually downloading the required packages on the laptop and copying them over on a USB stick gets really annoying.

The fix for that one is known, at least - manually compile and install a third-party driver. Not a problem as such, but it'll break on every kernel update if I don't remember to recompile, and the reason I want Ubuntu there in the first place is to not have to muck around with such things.

Re:looking forward to a future Ubuntu without upst

[disi]

I just read that Ubuntu is not going to use systemd
http://bheekly.blogspot.com/2010/08/systemd-in-gentoo.html

It is too early, I think. Gentoo is stuck between three systems at the moment. The stable is baselayout-1, the unstable is openrc and a heavily active systemd bug report. Apparently several init scripts don't like systemd and need adjustments, this takes time.

I am not heavily rebooting or stopping/starting services, so it's not really a problem to me and I am happy with openrc atm :)

Re:Flickery Display using S-Video under Intel i945

[tehcyder]

Eventually they'll die and wont need tech support anymore

Yeah, every cloud has a silver lining.

Really? Beta?

[TheQuantumShift]

Pull the other one.

1. Partitioning ignored my choice (install side by side) and wiped my whole disk. Not much of a loss, I was really done with Windows anyway. Too bad I relied upon it to do my backups... So then I got to unzip a few thousand zip files to recover my important stuff. If I ever run windows again, I sure won't be using the built in backup... But on the bright side, Ubuntu mounted my fake-raid and allowed me to access said zip files. Windows 7 wouldn't even see the drives without a special driver.
2. FGLRX is just broken. Installing it succeeded (or at least it said it did) but upon reboot, video output was hosed. No problem, I'll just boot from the live cd and change xorg.conf back to use the OSS driver. Except, xorg.conf was missing... All the info I could find said "X doesn't need that anymore", but no one could say how the fudge I could change the driver it was using...

Really, the thing I take the most issue with was the partitioner snafu. I didn't care about losing the windows part and knew I had a good backup. But Ubuntu is aimed at people that would care about that stuff and don't even know how to spell backup. The video driver is not all canonical's fault, but it still needs to be worked out. I would really expect a working 3D setup less than a month out. Other than all that, I liked all the new changes. Even the new theme. I really wish they'd ditch tomboy and gbrainy and just purge mono, and also add gimp back into the install. And port steam and source engine to Linux. And buy me a pony.

Why use Ubuntu?

[Demonslayer1337]

Ubuntu just has too many issues and when you are familiar with linux
I don't see why anyone would use the easy toy for former windows users (ubuntu),
when they could build a system themselves to various degress, LFS (Linux From Scratch)
if you really want to literally do it all yourself from scratch, Gentoo if you want
to have everything compiled and built yourself, or Arch Linux if you want a
similar approach but with a great package manager to simplify the time
consuming needs of the previous linux ways specified. I know many will
disagree, but in short, you are far better off in the end doing the work yourself
and having a system built to your needs that you can depend on.

uBUNTU

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is it ass-tacular,

now 200x more crAptastic!