I saw the same keyboard lagging with kubuntu intrepid (8.10/KDE 4.1). It was horrible. And it happened with all effects turned off on a state-of-the-art laptop at that time (the Dell Latitude which was just released in August 2008). It was so bad that you couldn't even use the terminal (konsole). Sometimes it was not there directly after rebooting, but after a few minutes using it, it suddenly kicked in.
In my case, this was really, really, horrible. I was really used to kubuntu, and I wasn't a very experienced linux user, yet. However, there was NO way for me to continue using kubuntu on this machine. It needed a recent kernel to get the new hardware supported; so using kubuntu hardy (8.04), which still offered KDE3 was not an option. I had no choice but go shopping for another distro, which was a lot of pain and work at the time. I ended up using Mandriva, where I could use KDE3 and KDE4 simultaneously. So I made my switch to KDE4 gradually, until I had figured out how to get everything working. After some time, I switched back to kubuntu. I just liked the repos and some other things better.
Still, remembering this entire story causes me a lot of pain. Would it really have been sooo difficult for kubuntu to keep supporting KDE3?
Well, there ARE differences between a manual install and a maintained package in the repos.
Parent is right: you can probably download OOo manually and install the binaries on 9.04. I did this several times with earlier versions. Of course, someone who is experienced in Linux can do this and will be able to fix the occasional dependency problem, etc. There are other issues, as well. OOo extensions can come as packages or can be installed manually in userland. In detail, it's not as totally trivial as you think.
However, this "fiddling around" (=time) brings down productivity a lot. Also it will hinder Grandma from doing it. If she starts, she may even mess up her installation. Therefore, I agree with GP that this is a weakness in many distros: you have to do a total upgrade of the OS if you want to have the latest version of your apps the convenient way. Oh, and with all the hardware-related issues that were changed in the kernel from 9.04 to 9.10, such an upgrade may not be a very smooth ride if you want to have everything working equally and the same way.
Usually, the ubuntu versions get better very significantly from version to version. However, the amount of time necessary for a 1:1 distro upgrade for a nicely tuned system is still considerable. Therefore, I see this as a weakness. Why can't we keep having the latest app upgrades on a tuned system without upgrading (especially if all hardware is already supported)?
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Hmm, I just had a PDF yesterday that looked different (=wrong) in KDE's okular than it looked in PDF XChange (Windows version). When I printed it from PDF XChange, some of the text underlines were so thick on the printout that they covered the text. Finally, I printed from Adobe's Reader to get the expected result...
I am just talking about the qualification level of U.S. versus overseas students in our pool of applicants for our PhD program (physics/materials science type). Many (most) of the U.S. applicants simply have much worse GPA/GRE grades. This is a top-50 U.S. university.
In our University, we notice that the overall strength of the graduate student applicants from overseas significantly decreased over the past few years. While we were under the impression to get the best and the brightest from countries like China a few years back, this does not seem to be the case any more. We think this is because many of them now find great opportunities in their countries and don't come here in the first place!
And no, this is not a good thing. Similarly to what was mentioned further above, we would LOVE to admit more U.S. students to our body, however there are simply not enough domestic student applicants who are strong enough to keep our cutting-edge research program going. So when we're no more getting the top foreign students, we are in trouble!
One more thing: there are significant differences in the qualities that U.S. students bring with them compared to foreign students. In China, the students seem to grow up in a very authoritative system, where discipline is very important. That is actually detrimental to out-of-the-box-thinking and creativity. So in this respect, the U.S. students are actually much better, and this is why we would like to have more of them. However, that's only one of the necessary qualities you need. Obviously, you also need a robust background in the sciences, and you need to be really motivated and hard working if you want to succeed in cutting-edge science and research.
It's funny how the entire article doesn't say much more than the summary. Adding the comments here, slashdot has more info on the story than the original article...
Nerds rule! (I always knew we do.)
On a European high-speed train, it's 8 relaxing, uninterrupted hours during which you can get some serious work done, walk around, get a coffee, or a meal in the restaurant. For a realistic comparison, you have to add a 1 hour commute to the airport, 2 hours of wait before the plain actually takes off, 1 hour for the commute from the airport to the place you finally want to be...makes altogether 6.5 hours during which can't get anything done, because you get pushed around from one waiting area to another, have to take off your clothes, get pushed into some small space where you can't actually move at all or stretch your legs, etc. Obviously the benefits just become more overwhelming as you talk about shorter distances (which are typical for Europe).
... now that they came up with an updated and "improved" set of rules? Will the officers feel that after the issue has now officially been reconsidered, there is an increased level legitimacy for such actions?
OK, I don't know a lot of background and politics of this all. I just downloaded and installed it (kubuntu jaunty 32bit). It works. Clicking on "About Google Chrome" in the settings pop-up menu (clicking the little wrench), it shows the "About" screen with the "Google Chrome" name. It mentions "made possible by the Chromium Open Source project...".
And, by the way: yes flash plugins can be enabled as described in the posts above. Testing a single youtube video it worked. However, the first flash ad on slashdot crashed! Remarkably, this didn't bring down the browser (still typing this post), just the ad (feature?). Looks like a nice programming job!
For what it's worth: I remember using Paint Shop Pro 9 a few years ago. It has a function called "Removal of JPEG artifacts" (or similar). I remember being surprised how well it worked. I also remember that PSP has quite good functionality for batch processing. So what you could do is use the "remove artifact" function and look at the difference before/after this function. The image with the bigger difference has to be the one of lower quality.
I am not sure if there is a tool that automatically calculates the difference between two images, but this is a task simple enough to be coded in a few lines (given the right libraries are at hand). For each color channel (RGB) of each pixel, you basically just calculate the square of the difference between the two images. Then you add all these numbers up (all pixels, all color channels). The bigger this number is, the bigger the difference between the images.
Maybe not your push-one-button solution, but should be doable. Just my $0.02.
Hmm. That's interesting: Many of us know MS as the very closed and proprietary monopolist, who's behavior is counter productive to the development of the entire computer industry (and maybe even to the economy?). Anyway, reading your comment I realize that they probably only got their wide-spread market adoption because their software was mainly deployed on an open (and thus cheap and broadly available) hardware architecture. In other words: The business model of this anti-open software monopolist only worked so well because they were deploying on open hardware! Seems like a trivial point, but it still struck me like an interesting turn. (Obviously, I am only talking about PC's and not about zune, xbox, etc.)
I just went to the statcounter.com page and looked at Germany. I always knew Germans liked Firefox, but look at these shocking numbers: #1 Firefox 3 (52%), #2 IE7 (22%), #3 IE6 (8%), #4 Firefox 2 (5%)!
They had USB, seamless mode, folder sharing, and clipboard (txt) support since version 1.x. Most of the additions that had been done since didn't really matter to me. What's really missing for a more seamless integration for me is support for drag and drop of files and other objects between host and guest. Other VMs support such functionality, so I wonder why VBox isn't doing it, despite all their fancy efforts.
Dude, you have the very same phenomenon in other languages, as well. Because English is your "prevalent" language, you're using "English" as a synonym for "language"...
I had HUGE issues with KDE 4.1 myself. It might be worth trying to switch off desktop effects. In my case, however, even that did not solve all the performance issues.
The big change came with KDE 4.2. Things really became very smooth and fast and rock solid. If you are planning to upgrade to jaunty, I would definitely recommend trying it. (If I remember correctly, there is also a way to run 4.2 on kubuntu 8.10 -- I think I did this for a while.)
"... this is the end of the KDE 4.2 line, which means for distros based on long-term support, it might be the thing to get used to for a while. "
Are you expecting KDE 4.3 to be so buggy that it is going to be uninteresting for long term support projects? In the past, there were huge leaps of progress from KDE 4.0 to KDE 4.1 to KDE 4.2!
Apparently, there is a backport to KDE3: https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty
I haven't tried it, though.
I was VERY frustrated with KDE 4.0 and KDE 4.1, and I was very much in need for a kubuntu KDE3 backport, especially as my new Dell E6400 needed a kernel > 2.6.26 to have all the hardware supported, so going with kubuntu 8.04 (the last with an official KDE3 support) was not an option for me. However, I am now a very happy KDE4 user. For my needs, it has already surpassed KDE 3 in terms of feature richness by a significant margin. And it runs extremely well and stable for me. Therefore this backport came too late for me.
I once thought this "Dual-Hibernate" (suspend-to-disk) was a great idea. However, I ran into real trouble as soon as I wanted to exchange data between the two partitions. Trying to mount an NTFS partition in Linux that was left hibernated by Windows can create a real mess. More generally, think of file systems in which you do not really have control at what time the data is actually physically written onto the disk.
Having all the data on a third partition that is unmounted before hibernating in either of the two OSs could work, though.
I have no idea how a "Dual-Suspend" would work if you mean "suspend-to-RAM"! How can you even start the other OS while one is in suspend? How do you tell each OS to only use a part of the memory?
Slashdot Mirror
I saw the same keyboard lagging with kubuntu intrepid (8.10/KDE 4.1). It was horrible. And it happened with all effects turned off on a state-of-the-art laptop at that time (the Dell Latitude which was just released in August 2008). It was so bad that you couldn't even use the terminal (konsole). Sometimes it was not there directly after rebooting, but after a few minutes using it, it suddenly kicked in.
In my case, this was really, really, horrible. I was really used to kubuntu, and I wasn't a very experienced linux user, yet. However, there was NO way for me to continue using kubuntu on this machine. It needed a recent kernel to get the new hardware supported; so using kubuntu hardy (8.04), which still offered KDE3 was not an option. I had no choice but go shopping for another distro, which was a lot of pain and work at the time. I ended up using Mandriva, where I could use KDE3 and KDE4 simultaneously. So I made my switch to KDE4 gradually, until I had figured out how to get everything working. After some time, I switched back to kubuntu. I just liked the repos and some other things better.
Still, remembering this entire story causes me a lot of pain. Would it really have been sooo difficult for kubuntu to keep supporting KDE3?
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
So one would really HAVE to delete ~/.wine manually in order to recover.
Isn't the difference between "purge" and "remove" that "purge" also removes the user settings (in this case ~/.wine)?
... While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort [...]
Well, there ARE differences between a manual install and a maintained package in the repos.
Parent is right: you can probably download OOo manually and install the binaries on 9.04. I did this several times with earlier versions. Of course, someone who is experienced in Linux can do this and will be able to fix the occasional dependency problem, etc. There are other issues, as well. OOo extensions can come as packages or can be installed manually in userland. In detail, it's not as totally trivial as you think.
However, this "fiddling around" (=time) brings down productivity a lot. Also it will hinder Grandma from doing it. If she starts, she may even mess up her installation. Therefore, I agree with GP that this is a weakness in many distros: you have to do a total upgrade of the OS if you want to have the latest version of your apps the convenient way. Oh, and with all the hardware-related issues that were changed in the kernel from 9.04 to 9.10, such an upgrade may not be a very smooth ride if you want to have everything working equally and the same way.
Usually, the ubuntu versions get better very significantly from version to version. However, the amount of time necessary for a 1:1 distro upgrade for a nicely tuned system is still considerable. Therefore, I see this as a weakness. Why can't we keep having the latest app upgrades on a tuned system without upgrading (especially if all hardware is already supported)?
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Hmm, I just had a PDF yesterday that looked different (=wrong) in KDE's okular than it looked in PDF XChange (Windows version). When I printed it from PDF XChange, some of the text underlines were so thick on the printout that they covered the text. Finally, I printed from Adobe's Reader to get the expected result ...
I am just talking about the qualification level of U.S. versus overseas students in our pool of applicants for our PhD program (physics/materials science type). Many (most) of the U.S. applicants simply have much worse GPA/GRE grades. This is a top-50 U.S. university.
In our University, we notice that the overall strength of the graduate student applicants from overseas significantly decreased over the past few years. While we were under the impression to get the best and the brightest from countries like China a few years back, this does not seem to be the case any more. We think this is because many of them now find great opportunities in their countries and don't come here in the first place!
And no, this is not a good thing. Similarly to what was mentioned further above, we would LOVE to admit more U.S. students to our body, however there are simply not enough domestic student applicants who are strong enough to keep our cutting-edge research program going. So when we're no more getting the top foreign students, we are in trouble!
One more thing: there are significant differences in the qualities that U.S. students bring with them compared to foreign students. In China, the students seem to grow up in a very authoritative system, where discipline is very important. That is actually detrimental to out-of-the-box-thinking and creativity. So in this respect, the U.S. students are actually much better, and this is why we would like to have more of them. However, that's only one of the necessary qualities you need. Obviously, you also need a robust background in the sciences, and you need to be really motivated and hard working if you want to succeed in cutting-edge science and research.
It's funny how the entire article doesn't say much more than the summary. Adding the comments here, slashdot has more info on the story than the original article...
Nerds rule! (I always knew we do.)
On a European high-speed train, it's 8 relaxing, uninterrupted hours during which you can get some serious work done, walk around, get a coffee, or a meal in the restaurant. For a realistic comparison, you have to add a 1 hour commute to the airport, 2 hours of wait before the plain actually takes off, 1 hour for the commute from the airport to the place you finally want to be...makes altogether 6.5 hours during which can't get anything done, because you get pushed around from one waiting area to another, have to take off your clothes, get pushed into some small space where you can't actually move at all or stretch your legs, etc. Obviously the benefits just become more overwhelming as you talk about shorter distances (which are typical for Europe).
... now that they came up with an updated and "improved" set of rules? Will the officers feel that after the issue has now officially been reconsidered, there is an increased level legitimacy for such actions?
OK, I don't know a lot of background and politics of this all. I just downloaded and installed it (kubuntu jaunty 32bit). It works. Clicking on "About Google Chrome" in the settings pop-up menu (clicking the little wrench), it shows the "About" screen with the "Google Chrome" name. It mentions "made possible by the Chromium Open Source project...".
And, by the way: yes flash plugins can be enabled as described in the posts above. Testing a single youtube video it worked. However, the first flash ad on slashdot crashed! Remarkably, this didn't bring down the browser (still typing this post), just the ad (feature?). Looks like a nice programming job!
Sad!
... pay the electric bill for your server backup project?
CDs have pressed pits, in CD-Rs the information is written into an organic dye layer bye the laser -- no pits, no pressing.
For what it's worth: I remember using Paint Shop Pro 9 a few years ago. It has a function called "Removal of JPEG artifacts" (or similar). I remember being surprised how well it worked. I also remember that PSP has quite good functionality for batch processing. So what you could do is use the "remove artifact" function and look at the difference before/after this function. The image with the bigger difference has to be the one of lower quality.
I am not sure if there is a tool that automatically calculates the difference between two images, but this is a task simple enough to be coded in a few lines (given the right libraries are at hand). For each color channel (RGB) of each pixel, you basically just calculate the square of the difference between the two images. Then you add all these numbers up (all pixels, all color channels). The bigger this number is, the bigger the difference between the images.
Maybe not your push-one-button solution, but should be doable. Just my $0.02.
Hmm. That's interesting: Many of us know MS as the very closed and proprietary monopolist, who's behavior is counter productive to the development of the entire computer industry (and maybe even to the economy?). Anyway, reading your comment I realize that they probably only got their wide-spread market adoption because their software was mainly deployed on an open (and thus cheap and broadly available) hardware architecture. In other words: The business model of this anti-open software monopolist only worked so well because they were deploying on open hardware! Seems like a trivial point, but it still struck me like an interesting turn. (Obviously, I am only talking about PC's and not about zune, xbox, etc.)
I just went to the statcounter.com page and looked at Germany. I always knew Germans liked Firefox, but look at these shocking numbers: #1 Firefox 3 (52%), #2 IE7 (22%), #3 IE6 (8%), #4 Firefox 2 (5%)!
They had USB, seamless mode, folder sharing, and clipboard (txt) support since version 1.x. Most of the additions that had been done since didn't really matter to me. What's really missing for a more seamless integration for me is support for drag and drop of files and other objects between host and guest. Other VMs support such functionality, so I wonder why VBox isn't doing it, despite all their fancy efforts.
Wow, this is unbelievable! I can't imagine how the Internet is any fun like this. Why is he doing this? Seems just totally eccentric to me.
Dude, you have the very same phenomenon in other languages, as well. Because English is your "prevalent" language, you're using "English" as a synonym for "language"...
I had HUGE issues with KDE 4.1 myself. It might be worth trying to switch off desktop effects. In my case, however, even that did not solve all the performance issues.
The big change came with KDE 4.2. Things really became very smooth and fast and rock solid. If you are planning to upgrade to jaunty, I would definitely recommend trying it. (If I remember correctly, there is also a way to run 4.2 on kubuntu 8.10 -- I think I did this for a while.)
" ... this is the end of the KDE 4.2 line, which means for distros based on long-term support, it might be the thing to get used to for a while. "
Are you expecting KDE 4.3 to be so buggy that it is going to be uninteresting for long term support projects? In the past, there were huge leaps of progress from KDE 4.0 to KDE 4.1 to KDE 4.2!
Apparently, there is a backport to KDE3:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty
I haven't tried it, though.
I was VERY frustrated with KDE 4.0 and KDE 4.1, and I was very much in need for a kubuntu KDE3 backport, especially as my new Dell E6400 needed a kernel > 2.6.26 to have all the hardware supported, so going with kubuntu 8.04 (the last with an official KDE3 support) was not an option for me. However, I am now a very happy KDE4 user. For my needs, it has already surpassed KDE 3 in terms of feature richness by a significant margin. And it runs extremely well and stable for me. Therefore this backport came too late for me.
I once thought this "Dual-Hibernate" (suspend-to-disk) was a great idea. However, I ran into real trouble as soon as I wanted to exchange data between the two partitions. Trying to mount an NTFS partition in Linux that was left hibernated by Windows can create a real mess. More generally, think of file systems in which you do not really have control at what time the data is actually physically written onto the disk. Having all the data on a third partition that is unmounted before hibernating in either of the two OSs could work, though.
I have no idea how a "Dual-Suspend" would work if you mean "suspend-to-RAM"! How can you even start the other OS while one is in suspend? How do you tell each OS to only use a part of the memory?