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Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Makes a First Appearance
srimadman writes "The Alpha 1 Release of Ubuntu 11.04, often known as 'Natty Narwhal,' is intended as a developer snapshot of the next major Ubuntu version, which is due in April."
So, if you want to try Unity and Wayland before your neighbors do, this is the time.
As an option, yes, but not as the default X server. You can expect it to be really buggy right now, though.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
I so hoped they would go with the suggestion from the guy over at LinuxHaters blog: Ubuntu 11 - "Naughty Nutgoblin". Seriously, who comes up with those naming schemes?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Installer crashes and burns, at least when run under VirtualBox, it complains one of the packages is malformed and then crashes.
Not sure if the installed OS is runnable after this, it might be but I didn't want to mess around with it, I'll wait for Alpha 2.
But at least in the current setup unity is garbage. They say it was initially designed for netbooks,yet the ui is really laggy on a low end processor and the menu bar takes up around 10% of the left side, on a machine with an already small real estate. Gnome however runs smoothly and takes up almost no real estate. They also chose for some reason to make the settings and properties menus completely disappear. This is linux, not iOS! Oh and this is typed from an eee pc with ubuntu 10.10 on it, with unity, but currently using gnome.
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/natty/alpha1
The release numbers are "year.month".
Is it really that hard to include a link to Ubuntu's official Alpha 1 page, http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/alpha1 ?
Yes, apparently. Natty Narwhal Alpha 1
Is it really that hard to include a link to Ubuntu's official Alpha 1 page, http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/alpha1 ?
Yes, apparently. Natty Narwhal Alpha 1
You make a compelling point there.
Maybe I should become a /. editor, since I already seem to have the vital skills :D
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
The main point is that even if you run wayland, you will still have to run X on top of it.
Wayland has no drawing api, and it's scope is extremely limited compared to x, x will still be needed on top of it for the forseeable future.
I have no idea why there are all these stories that are implying wayland is more than what it is. It sasy specifically on the website that it is not a replacement for x and will need something like X to draw on it *sigh*
And they would be reimplementing large portions of X's job by doing so. So instead of a known common protocol that is consistent with a few implementation problems, you have a whole new untested drawing system that is GTK specific too... great.
Well it's not like DRI is untested, it's being used by drivers today to provide hardware acceleration for OpenGL. It's more that now everyone talks OpenGL rather than the X protocol. The upside is a greatly simplified display server, the hardware (or the software fallback) does all the rendering and compositing. This makes Linux work like a modern desktop same as OS X or Win7 with every application a hardware accelerated 3D client. The downside is that what works locally - send everything to the graphics card and let the hardware work it out - works terribly over the network as you go from an extremely wide pipe (PCIe x16 mostly) to whatever the network/internet speed is.
To be honest I think remote applications need a simpler rendering protocol, it's just not realistic to have an application look the same across a 56k dial-up link as it does locally where a thousand shaders can process 1 GB of textures to render something. Either you go down the VNC route and display the output our you need a simplified protocol which is better covered by web applications or some more "real" remote application protocol. X is neither, from what I gather most rendering toolkits no longer use the X primitives because they're too primitive, so they render it and send it as pixmaps anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The known protocol is decades old, the people that originally wrote them is retired or dead or too old to work hard on it full time like a 20-30something.
FTP is decades old, and the original spec developers are likely reaching retiring age, same with tcp/ip v4, so should we drop all of that too? this argument is silly.
2)This code is so complex, and very very difficult to maintain.
With a project of this size and with this much use, there is constant adaptation going on to new circumstances (3d graphics cards etc) after the new functionality is stable it all tends to get cleaned up. X of today is not the X of 20 years ago, maintainers aren't masochists they do do cleanups etc.
3)The X system is not designed for current desktops, 3d graphic cards, low latency and personal computers, it is designed for mainframes, corporate, boring stuff, making Linux obsolete compared to MacOSX, iOS, or Windows 7 that redesigned their graphic systems.
Bullshit, the fundamentals of drawing have not changed at all, whether 3d acceleration is used for rendering or not is an implementation detail not a flaw with the protocol itself. If you can explain how the fundamentals of drawing things to a screen are different for professional use as opposed to home use, I'd like to hear it.
Again by your logic everything should be reimplemented every five years just because even if it works perfectly reinventing it would make it 'more awesome' this is idiotic.
FTP is decades old, and the original spec developers are likely reaching retiring age, same with tcp/ip v4, so should we drop all of that too?
You could not have picked worse examples to prove your point.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?