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Ubuntu 10.10 Multitouch Support Demo
Timothy found a news report and a little video demonstrating the multi-touch capabilities of Ubuntu. It's attached below if you're curious what the new Unity Netbook UI is looking like these days.
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I'm pretty sure that video broke 2-3 patents that were just granted to Apple. Apple should totally sue them and take 10% of their revenue from selling downloads of Ub... Nevermind.
That's pretty good so far. Hopefully we can configure the icon bar on the left to hide by default the same way you can hide the task bar on any desktop. Speaking of the task bar, how is task switching accomplished on this thing? I may have missed it in the video. Is there a gesture that does the same thing as Alt-TAB?
My biggest concern, what happens when you want(yes, want) to use the terminal?
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One thing that wasn't mentioned in the article text or accompanying video that I am curious about, how does text input work? When a text bar or area is activated does it bring up a keyboard?
One of the important UI changes about a touch-only interface is that things such as managing the filesystem, arranging folders and icons, etc. are too cumbersome to do in the traditional navigator window type of interface.
iOS just gets rid of it altogether whereas Android limits you to handling files via applications. Unless they've managed to come up with a proper auto-categorization and file organizer -- such that I don't need to go through folders to get to a media file I want to play -- this will still be a cumbersome desktop OS with a touch UI "layer" on top.
I think it looks great, but I can't help but think that using application windows like on a regular desktop is maybe a step backwards for multitouch tablet devices. Sure, people are familiar with opening and maximizing or minimizing windows, but the buttons for such windows are small compared to the rest of the screen and hard to hit with clumsy fingers (especially mine). It's nice that the Unity desktop has the vertical launch bar on the left side - could this launch bar not be modified to function almost as a tab bar for open applications? That'd be much easier, I think, for touch and gesture based devices. Or, even better, use the Expose style overview mode to switch between windows (as shown in the video) rather than allowing the user to reshape and manipulate windows directly.
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I saw no real multi-touch features demonstrated in the video. He just moved the window around with more that one finger. I can do that on any touch screen.
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Maybe it's me, but I think Unity would rock hard as the front end for a Home Theatre PC.
Music, Video, Game System Emulators (NES FTW), Photo Sharing... Sounds about right.
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Now if Ubuntu would just rethink the UI and make it essentially touch based rather than just hiding the mouse pointer...
though over the weekend I had to boot ubuntu on a samsung laptop to backup someones files before they formatted, and it couldn't find the network card (though windows 7 had no problem). So I am glad were focusing on the important stuff, like multitouch, that not many people have
"Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them."
I think most socially-awkward computer nerds are NOT happy with this condescending double-entendre!
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incorporate a multi-touch screen version of a chorded keyboard for the command line.
Nullius in verba
Anyone else, hate touch screens? I can't bring myself to actually touch a screen smudges and smears finger prints and oils all drive me crazy on the screen. Give me a keyboard and mouse any day.
Its all good if your netbook or tablet has a touchscreen, but I find it clunky compared to the 10.04
netbook ubuntu for my regular netbooks.
No, you're just not touching it the right way.
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I recently got an Asus EEE (1001px) netbook as a gift, and it came with Windows 7 starter. Now, I use windows 7 at home (ultimate) and I don't dislike it, but I was very unhappy with starter. You can't even change the background image, I mean, what the fuck.
Anyways, I used to use linux (I mean, like 10 years ago when I was in highschool I used to use debian and slackware), but haven't really since. I decided to try ubuntu so I did a USB installation and put 10.10 netbook edition. I have to say, it was just as easy (if not easier) than a win7 installation (which I have to do often), and is WAY better on a netbook.
I think people who say linux is popular on portables are exactly right. It's an awesome fit, and I love it.
Funny you should phrase it that way; my main thought while watching the video was "This is a true point-and-drool interface".
It wasn't until the very end that there was a brief glance at a screen that hinted at the existence of some sort of keyboard somewhere. But that didn't last long enough to scare the keyboard-averse, who are presumably the intended audience.
I also noticed a curious line around the edges that make it look like one of those screens that rotates and flips to hide a keyboard on the inside of the other half. Does this gadget have a physical keyboard hidden inside? Or, alternatively, does it open up to show a second keyboard on the other half?
Maybe I should just visit Dell and see if they have any actual info about it. But that might be too close to RTFA, so maybe I shouldn't admit here to every considering doing such a thing.
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Is 10.10 available?
Released on 10/10/10.
I use Ubuntu desktop LTS (10.04 I believe I'm on) and just download when something new is available
By default, LTS installations only update to newer LTS releases, which 10.10 isn't. You can change that in menu System > Administration > Software Sources, on the Updates tab. Read the release notes before upgrading, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/ReleaseNotes
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So will the multi-touch work on my Fujitsu T4310 Lifebook? It has a multi-touch capacitive touch screen which works great in Windows 7.
The difference is that you only poked it with one stick
You have to poke it with two sticks (or more) to wake it up.
I will say from experience that Unity sucks a big fat one on netbooks. I'm not talking about old netbooks, either. I just bought a brand new HP Mini 210 and an Acer AO532h Both have an Atom N450, which isn't the fastest processor in the world, but Unity runs like a slideshow on both of them. It's supposed to be a distribution optimized for netbooks. The dock is almost unusable because of the lag, and it launches apps slow as hell. The 10.04 netbook interface was much faster and more responsive. Sure Unity is (or could be) slick and pretty, but the netbook remix isn't supposed to be about slick and pretty. It's supposed to be about fast and easy performance on sub-standard hardware.
I think at this point it might be entirely appropriate to separate the netbook distro from a tablet distro. Tablet PC's have substantially more horsepower than netbooks, the two projects have completely different goals. Why have them in a single distro? On my netbook I ended up hacking in the old netbook interface and it works great, but what I did is out of the reach of most people that the Ubuntu community is trying to attract. If they could get this OS on $250 netbooks from Wal-Mart, maybe the general public would realize that Linux doesn't suck, and isn't hard to use. I shouldn't need to re-compile my kernel to figure that out.
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I can say that my Magic Mouse now works flawlessly with 10.10, while past versions required a kernel module that was pretty flaky.