The recently released 10.04 version of Ubuntu is the third Long Term Support (LTS) version Canonical has released. I installed this new version on four of my laptops (2 netbooks, 1 normal laptop, 1 portable desktop replacement), and here’s my impression of it.
The installation is much simpler and more to the point that ever before. I really liked the look and feel of it. In all cases, either installing from scratch (in 2 of my laptops), or upgrading (in the rest 2 of my laptops), everything worked perfectly. I remember back in the day when upgrades occasionally would break X11 etc, but not this time. The only setting that was not preserved was under my husband’s account: the “two finger scrolling” setting on the Synaptic mouse panel was reverted to “edge scrolling” after upgrading. No biggie.
Loading Ubuntu is now super-fast. It loads at around 10 seconds on my hard drive-based laptops, and in about 15 seconds on my SSD-based ones. The new login screen is beautiful and functional. Only thing I’d like added in that screen would be a battery life indicator.
Originally, I had a stability issue with a complete lockup, but after the first update packages hit the mirrors, the problem disappeared (I’m guessing that I was hitting the well-publicized Intel gfx driver issue). Since these updates, everything has been rock solid, and with a good performance.
Compared to older releases, this version requires more RAM. Two of my laptops have 512 MB of RAM (I will upgrade one of these to 1 GB, but not the other, because that netbook is too messy to open up), and while the system would start up using only about 130 MB of that RAM, by the moment I would use the package manager, it’d use up all that RAM, plus an additional 150 MB of swap. I also noticed that after having the machine used for a few days without a reboot, the RAM usage will go up little by little, as evident in my screenshot below. However, if you’re not using Open Office, or installing lots of packages, or having too many Firefox tabs open, 512 MB of RAM should be enough. I calculated that I’d need about 768 MB of RAM as a minimum for a more “involved” usage pattern. Since I’m preparing the 512 MB netbook for my mom, who she can’t use a computer yet (I’m hoping to teach her when I visit her soon), I think 512 MB will be enough for her.
Ubuntu 10.04 on HP netbook, upgraded
In terms of new features, there is a new dark theme, and new notification applets into play, which I thought they looked and functioned well. Canonical has done a lot of work reworking the look and functionality of their main applets, and this has paid of. Only gripe I have is that one of these indicator applets doesn’t let you remove the “mail” icon, so it takes up space on my netbook’s limited screen space for nothing — since I don’t use Evolution (I only use Gmail, online). And there’s no way to setup the mail notification just to get Gmail notifications (without the involvement of Evolution).
Other new features include the new Ubuntu music store, and Ubuntu One — features that I personally don’t have any use for. However, I was happy to see an updated Empathy client, and a new social application with support for Twitter and Facebook. I hope they add Buzz support soon too! Maybe some Google Voice integration via a new Ubuntu-sponsored VoIP server would be nice too!
Ubuntu 10.04 on Acer Aspire One netbook, fresh install
The only thing that really didn’t sit well with me was the removal of the “Menus & Toolbars” dialog. Ubuntu now has a default setting of “selective text besides icons”. You can’t change that, not even via gconf-editor (update: apparently it’s there, under the guise of “toolbar-style”). This is not a great idea for small screens, like my two netbooks, one of which has only a 1024×576 resolution (and please don’t direct me to “Ubuntu Netbook Remix” distro — not interested). I understand the need for defaults and ease of use, but this is one UI feature that is still needed.
Another new feature on Ubuntu is now the inclusion of the video editor PiTiVi. PiTiVi is my favorite Linux video editor in terms of usage simplicity. Unfortunately, just before the release of Ubuntu, they switched to a new way of rendering, that made the editor’s previewing 100 to 150 times slower (currently it’s software rendering only, hardware acceleration is planned for later in the year). Whereas in all the previous versions I was able to edit MPEG4-SP from 720p Kodak digicams *faster than real-time*, now I was left with about 1 frame per 2-3 seconds. This has made PiTiVi utterly useless to me [and my mom]. Its developers told me that they made these architectural changes in order to add features that required it, like transitions, fades, and what not. Speaking as a filmmaker, I prefer a cuts-only featureless video editor that is able to preview these cuts in real time, rather than adding a few more features that makes the editor so dog-slow that it doesn’t give me an overview of what I’m editing (making editing “blind”). There’s a saying among us filmmakers: “if you can’t do it with plain cuts, then you’re doing it wrong”.
On the bright side of things, suspend-to-RAM works perfectly across the board. Linux and Ubuntu have come a long way supporting all these different BIOS and offering a great experience with laptop sleep. In fact, my portable desktop replacement laptop was always problematic in terms of sleep, and required kernel patches. Not with this version, where everything worked out of the box!
The only thing that I had to manually add support for was for one of my Acer netbook. I had to download and put on my rc.local the “acerfand” service. Without it, the fan would never stop spinning, and that had a massive battery life impact (battery life down to 1:30 hours from the normal 2:30 hours). But again, in retrospect, that specific netbook used to require a lot of extra work after installing Ubuntu: from microphone drivers, wifi drivers, special secondary SDHC slot support, fan, etc etc. This time instead, all I had to do was to take care of the fan. Everything else worked out of the box.
As a conclusion, it is my opinion, that Ubuntu is by far the most usable Linux distribution, and for many people it’s perfect as a replacement to Windows and Mac OS X. Back in the day there were a lot of “but” when someone was suggesting Ubuntu as a complete replacement, but I think that the distro has come a long way, and delivers the goods.
Rating: 9/10
You are right, damn those H.264 pushers they should…..
Oh, this is about Ubuntu….. good review.
To get rid of the messages thing, uninstall indicator-messages.
If you don’t use the me menu, you can uninstall indicator-me (this will allow you to still use the the session indicator, which IMO is much better than the other replacements for the GNOME panel).
If you want to save horizontal space on the panel, install dockbarx (it’s in some PPA), which works much like Windows 7’s taskbar.
Also, replacing the “Menu Bar” with “Main Menu” saves a lot of space.
Hey, dockbarx is so cool, thx. for the tip.
I know how to do all this, but it’s not what I want to do. You see, I still want the battery and volume indicators. I don’t want to remove the whole applet! I just want to be able enable/disable some of them to never show up (e.g. mail). Another example, in the me menu, is the fact that it displays my username, “eugenia”, while it would save space if it just displayed my user icon. So basically, I do want the features offered, I just need some basic power over them. The solution is not removal, but some preferences.
Also, I avoid third party toolbars etc. I need stability and memory efficiency for my mom. Third party stuff usually break after updates, so I try to avoid them. If something breaks on my mom’s netbook, she will have no one to take care of the problem, since she’s in Greece, and I’m in the US.
Edited 2010-05-06 21:34 UTC
Removing indicator-messages will only remove the mail icon. It will not remove any of the other things like volume (same thing with removing me menu).
I agree that a setting certainly would be nice, but removing it and installing it as needed should be okay in most cases.
Then you probably would want to avoid dockbarx. I’ve never had any issues with it, but I’ve noticed that some people (even people who are good with computers) have a hard time with it.
What about adding the applets: ‘User Switcher’ and/or ‘Shut Down’ or something like that, their is more then just the ones that are selected by default
One of the features that I really love from the new Empathy/Ubuntu is the integration of “Share my desktop” in Empathy, using Vino. It makes remote support for my family members much easier. Give it a try.
I have also seen people “hacking in” support for GMail into the message indicator, without having to go through Evolution. It is still far from easy, if I remember correctly, but it will surely be polished and packaged up nicely soon.
If you’re getting rid of all that, you might anyway switch to using Kubuntu 10.04! In fact, Kubuntu is quite close to the usability offered by the ‘default’ Ubuntu.
She only wanted to remove the email/evolution part. Uninstalling indicator-messages also removes the gwibber applet (Twitter/Facebook messages).
I just installed Lucid on my new netbook. It was mostly a good experience. One of the funny things was that MSI chose to not provide a driver for the touchpad and Windows 7 treats it as a standard PS/2 mouse with no finger scrolling. There was no driver on their site (it just said: Use Windows 7 standard PD/2 driver). Fortunately, Ubuntu had no problem with that! I likes my finger scrolling.
The only problems, challenges:
1. I do not like the new battery widget. Clicking on it shows you the time left, but I cannot see the percentage. I suppose I could just install the Acpi command-line application and do ‘acpi -V’ to get details.
2. The buttons are wierd on the left, but things like that don’t bother me. Muscle memory won’t take long.
3. The Wifi did not work out of the box. I had to download a .deb package for the card (from a third party), and install DKMS, as well as edit /etc/modules. As long as there is a solution, I don’t mind.
I started with Linux aroud 1994. MY how things have improved. We really take this ease of use for granted. I especially like how well suspend works these days. That was always a real pain for me.
Edited 2010-05-06 21:36 UTC
>Clicking on it shows you the time left, but I cannot see the percentage
Click on that indication text, and a new dialog will open up. There, you will find the percentage.
This also bothers me btw.
Thanks, I never would have guessed that. I’m used to just hovering over the battery icon.
I am simply amazed by this release, it really feels like an off the shelf OS easily earning a place with Windows and Mac OSX. Im not putting down other distributions, as linux as a whole is pushing forward. However 10.04 is really polished, it’s fast and stable, it’s really made my jaw hit the ground.
I had numerous problems with the 9.10, 9.04 was ok but many of the times i reverted to 8.04 LTS. I am a debian / ubuntu fan, i do love debian however i tend to use this only on servers. I have only tested 10.04 on the desktop, i haven’t really tried the server edition out, i have tried a standard lamp install and the server did boot up very quickly which was impressive, however back on topic.
I installed 10.04 on a Lenovo G530, 2GB RAM and a 250GB SATA HDD, intel VGA, 15.4″ widescreen monitor.
I do like the new dark theme, it seems to work really well with the screen, making text easy to read. Opening applications and menus is incredibly snappy. 9.10 was a lot slower. Gnome seems to be multithreaded or enhanced in a big way, i can keep clicking and opening apps without the menu’s pausing or any sort of slow down.
The wireless connection seems very stable, even coming out of hibernation or sleep.
I also agree with the article in regard to memory, default memory usage was about 350 – 400MB at boot, which might be a sign that because of the 2GB the machine is using more memory for caching? I don’t mind too much on this machine however i have to test this with 1GB machines to be really sure of how well this system works. As i mentioned i don’t mind as Win7 uses the same amount of RAM on the same machine (well perhaps a little more say about 520MB – 550MB).
ill just end with another Wow, this is an incredible release for linux, this really should start making more inroads for the linux world.
This article (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/05/gmail-notifier-puts-gmail-in-you…) should help you add GMail to the mail indicator applet.
Why would it boot faster from a HD than from an SSD? I thought SSDs were faster at everything.
Netbooks normally have cheap and slow SSDs. Normal Notebook Hds are faster.
Well, they aren’t always faster especially if it’s a low-end cheap ssd such as those found in Acer netbooks. Some of those ssds are no better than class 2 sd cards. NOt saying this was the case for the ssd, just pointing out that in order for them to be fast you need a high quality one. Otherwise, they can be dog slow.
I thought it was a typo or something, my SSD-installs boot “way” faster than regular HDD-installs.
I have to agree with the review. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences so far. I’m particularly happy with the removal of the hal daemon, which finally brings GNOME’s power consumption down to proper levels and is very very good for battery life. I also wish I could change the indicator’s mail icon, though in my case to Thunderbird. I hate Evolution, it’s massively bloated and crash-prone and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better, quite the opposite. Evolution is devolving, though it’s an upstream problem not an Ubuntu one. At least Thunderbird, while a bit on the heavy side, doesn’t crash on me and actually threads my mail properly.
Ubuntu One is nice for what it is, I use it to sync my documents across my systems. I wish it had bookmark sync too, but hey there’s Xmarks for that I guess.
All in all, a very nice release.
This is for Thunderbird, although it needs to be running, which makes it a bit superfluous to my usage; I’ll probably uninstall it. Note that Evolution has this ‘service’ running all the time…
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2010/02/09/indicator-applet-libnoti…
I was thinking about submitting a review from a Mac user’s perspective.
I have Ubuntu 10.04 running on an old Dell Dimension 2400 with PCI Radeon 9250 card (yuk).
Once things were finally setup, it runs pretty well despite the age of this old machine. There are weird screen flickers and no compiz support on this old card (due to some bug in its rendering). Not sure if those are driver problems or what… but otherwise, it browses the web fine and seems to even have a slight edge on good ol’ XP.
But that’s after it was finally setup.
It took me about three days worth of down time to get it working right after the install.
I used the wubi installer feature, which seemed to work painlessly in XP but died after reboot. The GUI installer could not continue, and it said I had to reboot. And that’s it. No indication of the error. I rebooted a couple of times to see if it would continue and finally chose the verbose/failsafe option since I had no other information.
It continued and finished installing finally.
Booting into Ubuntu did work although I noticed that the screen resolution was wrong and everything was a little fuzzy. Turns out, it did not seem to detect my video card or lcd monitor. Might be because I use a KVM on this, which might be problematic for Linux, but works brilliantly in XP and Leopard.
Here was a dead end for a while. I tried different options of detecting my monitor, but X would not go above some weird resolution for a widescreen monitor. I searched a long time for how to add resolutions or detect my monitor or video card to fix this (xrandr and other stuff) but had no luck until I found someone’s old xorg.conf file posted on some other Linux forums with the settings for this silly LCD monitor. Plugged them in and now I can use 1280×1024 resolution and things seem less fuzzy.
So sort of a happy ending for now. I would love to see Ubuntu polish itself up with more options for helping people. I know things have improved, but it should not let video cards and monitors go undetected. If they are undetected, Ubuntu should quickly tell you this is a problem and fix it for you (or allow you to punch display information yourself and search a database for solutions). Maybe more troubleshooting options or direct links to troubleshooting information?
Of course, as long as you still have to edit xorg.conf, Ubuntu (or X) should get an F for usability, but it sounds like it may just have been my goofy KVM setup. If it works for most people, it should be good enough. Still, I’ve never had to use the Terminal or command line in Windows or Mac OS to get things installed, so there is still work to be done.
The OS looks great, is beginning to have a decent sense of personality and style to it, and comes with Chromium or Chrome easily installed. Ubuntu is starting to put a serious shine on the Linux name. I’m enjoying playing around with it for now.
Sadly, I can’t comment much on Ubuntu 10.04 because my combo of a Dell Vostro 400, an ATI HD 2600 XT card and a Dell 24″ (1920×1080) monitor apparently upset 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 enough that the graphical installer blanked the screen and never came back.
I did indeed manage to use the text installer to get Ubuntu 10.04 onto the Vostro, but then hit the same screen blanking problem when booting the installed Ubuntu.
Note that the same machine has run Fedora 8 through to 13 beta fine, both Vista and Windows 7 fine and Ubuntu 9.04 fine too. I suspect that my combo hasn’t been tested with Ubuntu 10.04 and I’ve no idea what to report (“blank screen with my setup”) really. I think I’ll stick with Fedora, which at least works for me!
I had the same issue with an aging Toshiba laptop that I currently run Arch on. With that said, I’m not terribly upset, as I only use it to test distros and 10.04 runs fine on my main machine.
That confirms what I’ve experienced as well. Fedora seems to work better with the different systems I’ve had.
Try hitting ESC at grub time, and edit the vmlinuz line of the bootloader config adding at the end “nomodeset” (no quoutes).
Before upgrade, I had working 9.10. During upgrade it asked me something about config file. But it has already lost USB, so I could not use keyboard or mouse. I’ve tried to connect to other ports, nothing works. So I’ve rebooted. And it does not boot anymore. F…ing grub2. I needs to reinstall everything. Maybe this is a good moment to try different distribution.
And another thing. People were complaining about colors of previous themes. But, personally, the brown one was Ok. But the pink one is disguisting.
That’s why I never upgrade any OS. I have never had an upgrade of any OS that did not break things. Clean installs work much better.
I agree. A quick “sudo apt-get install shiki-colors” fixes the problem though.
Edited 2010-05-07 00:02 UTC
> A quick “sudo apt-get install shiki-colors” fixes the problem though.
I like this theme, thanks for the reference.
Edited 2010-05-07 00:18 UTC
Heh? 9.10 came out in october. What are you suggesting here, that Ubuntu users do a clean install every year?
I also don’t see how losing USB is excusable.
Ubuntu obviously still has problems with breaking working hardware.
Twice each year.
It isn’t difficult … with Linux distributions, it is possible to mount the user files area ( /home ) on a different partion to the OS + applications.
If you prepare your hard disk with appropriate partitions in this way, and you also save a backup copy of all files in /etc to an archive, then an Ubuntu update to a new version of the OS from a liveCD takes no more than 10 minutes or so (one re-boot with the LiveCD, and a second re-boot to the new OS HD installation is all that is required, and Ubuntu boots in 15 seconds anyway).
I know this is hard to understand for anyone who has installed or restore a Windows OS (the last one I did required about 20 re-boots, and each re-boot took 3 minutes), but it is true.
I have found one even better solution, though (at least it works better for me). If you are not afraid of having to follow a set of instructions, then Arch Linux is a very good rolling distribution, I have found. A rolling distribution is one where incremental updates are installed whenever they become available, in a fashion similar to Windows Update (except the scope is the entire set of installed software, not just the OS and the Office suite).
http://www.archlinux.org/
Arch Linux updated to KDE 4.4.3 a few days ago:
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=-last_update&arch=x86_64&re…
and so it is already more up to date than Kubuntu 10.04. Arch has an intrinsically better implementation of KDE than Kubuntu does anyway. Having tried Kubuntu 10.04 for a week or so, I have moved back to Arch. This is what I am running right now.
To the regular user this is going to seem ridiculous. If Ubuntu wants to expand their marketshare then they need to improve their upgrade process.
I’m not looking for a Linux distribution, I only periodically test Linux distros out of curiosity to see how much they have progressed. My opinion is that Linux is not ready for the desktop and upgrade issues are a major factor. It’s fine for the server but even then I would trust FreeBSD over the typical Linux distro when it comes to upgrades.
You are clearly not an expert then in the suitability of Linux for the desktop.
Either way of keeping a distribution upgraded … a rolling distribution such as Arch, or a 6-monthly re-install (upgrade) of the OS partition (with user files intact), is far faster and easier than Windows Update plus however many independent application updaters must be running. Then again, Windows Update + application updaters don’t actually upgrade your Windows version, does it, it merely updates the current Windows version. You have to pay over again for Windows if you want an upgrade.
Ubuntu 10.04 is a LTS edition. Of course this means that if you like, you can stick to this standard for three years or more, if you are after updates only (stability-with-security-patches) rather than cutting edge upgrades every six months. It is up to you.
Upgrade or update … either way Ubuntu is way, way easier than Windows. Several times easier.
Edited 2010-05-07 06:33 UTC
That is just plain fanboy comment.
I’ve never understood why people recommend these rolling release distributions. They need *constant* tinkering, which may be fine if you are the sort of person who likes that. Recommending those to a Joe is ridiculous.
In the real world, people and companies prefer Red Hat and SuSe exactly because of the stability, long-term support, and avoidance of hassle and tinkering.
And most Linux users are like that. It’s going to be that way for a long time.
In the real world, people and companies use LTS versions (like the one we’re discussing) exactly because of the stability, long-term support, and avoidance of hassle and tinkering. You do know what “LTS” stands for right?
And before you start screaming “fanboy” at me too: I started using Linux with Slackware, and it is still by far my favorite distro. I was resistant to Debian back in the late 90’s/early 00’s, and I didn’t care for Ubuntu in its first few years either. It’s only recently that I’ve come to appreciate it as an everyday OS. So, take it from someone who is used to the rock-solid dependability of Slackware that this current version (so far) has exceeded my expectations.
I understand it – misguided enthusiasm. I’m willing to put up with the constant tinkering required to use the latest from Fedora and Ubuntu. For Joe Average, it’s CentOS or Ubuntu LTS
In my experience, most companies which run Red Hat, do so because of the software they run and which is only validated with a specific RHS version.
So it is more like app support that the supposedly higher stability which tends to be the main value proposition from Red Hat,
Arch is described in its faq as a do-it-yourself system. That’s not even on the map of usability for typical users. Suggesting that a 6 month re-install of Ubuntu would be easier for users than upgrading Windows is absurd. Windows auto-updates without breaking working hardware and major upgrades are not needed every 6 months. Most Windows users are still running XP and don’t have to worry about an upgrade breaking their USB.
Until you want to upgrade software that is tied a newer release.
How much faith can you have in Linux advocacy when people have been trying it for years? There’s obviously something wrong with the software. Every year we get reviews that claim the latest version of Ubuntu is a 9/10 and yet Linux stays at 1%. Why is that?
Because a secret conspirancy from Redmond?
True. Arch is for people who know what they are doing. If people know what they are doing, they won’t be running Windows.
How so? To upgrade/re-install Kubuntu, which I have just finished doing for my wife’s netbook, is a matter of booting the liveCD (or in this case, LiveUSB), clicking on the “install Kubuntu” icon once it has booted (if the liveCD or liveUSB boots OK then it obviously works on this machine), and then answering a few questions about your name, location, and what you want to call this computer. There is one tricky bit where you have to select “manually configure partitions” but all that you do is select the same partitions as you had already set up on the previous installation. If you did it last time, it isn’t a big ask to get this done again this time. Just remember … the ONLY partition that you re-format is the root partition “/”. This will preserve user files and settings.
Having done that the rest of the install runs itself and is finished in 20 minutes or less.
Oh yes they are. I have known a number of Windows users who cannot keep a Windows machine clean enough to keep it working for even that long.
But they do have to worry about not typing ANY personal information at all on their machine, lest a keylogger send their bank details off to a cyber-criminal somewhere.
BTW, I’ve never had anything break on me after literally hundreds of (clean) installs and re-installs of various Linux distributions. I simply don’t upgrade any distribution, I always just re-format root (“/”). I think there must be a lot of masochists out there wanting to find a way to break something, and figuring that an incremental upgrade only like Windows does it (rather than a fresh re-install) is surely the best way to go about it.
Exactly. Upgrade to new release, and LTS stability, are antonyms. You can do one or the other, but not both.
So?
It is the same for any system.
That is simple. Average people can’t buy it. It is not available in stores, and it is not offered to them. Some of them might have heard of it, but rarely ever seen a LiveCD, and even if they had they wouldn’t try it because some nutter like you had been feeding them scare stories.
After all, it is the easiest thing in the world to check if your network, USB, printer, audio and wireless are all still working just while the LiveCD is running. If something doesn’t work (not that I’ve ever seen such a case) … then simply don’t install this LiveCD to hard disk.
Having said that, Linux is way, way over 1% use. There is a huge PR/marketing incentive to maintain the fiction that Linux market share is only 1%, but its installed base is in reality way higher than that.
If we widen our horizons just a little to beyond simply the desktop: there would actually be more CPUs running Linux than Windows.
Edited 2010-05-07 14:35 UTC
Upgrading Windows involves setting it to auto-update and occasionally restarting the computer.
Who are you trying to convince here? I already told you that I have no problem managing a Nix system. For typical users though it is unrealistic to expect them to understand what a partition is. Windows and OSX don’t require them to and neither should Linux.
It isn’t sold in stores because people don’t want it. The Windows 7 beta had more users than Linux even though it wasn’t available in stores. There are a lot of technically proficient people out there that want nothing to do with Linux. Linux has unresolved issues and a major one is upgrading.
Oh I’m the nutter. That must be why I think OSX is perfectly fine for new users. I must be a Windows/OSX advocate.
And you base that on what?
The 1% comes from browser stats and it’s likely a conservative estimate.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-200904-201005
All a conspiracy I’m sure. Couldn’t be that Linux actually has problems on the desktop.
It isn’t sold in stores because people don’t want it. The Windows 7 beta had more users than Linux even though it wasn’t available in stores
Touche.
Nope. That would update Windows, very slowly, painfully, requiring several re-boots and a lot of download bandwidth, but it wouldn’t upgrade Windows. not at all.
Linux doesn’t require it either.
However, unlike Windows (I don’t know about OSX), IF you take the simple-to-achieve step of moving /home on to a separate partition, then Linux plus all your applications can be upgraded to a new version completely painlessly in 20 minutes or so, without having to back up. I know this because I have done it many times.
You simply cannot do that with Windows, no matter how good a manager you are.
If you truly knew anything about “Nix systems”, you would admit this.
I cannot fathom why it is so important to you to try to maintain this myth, but it is an utter lie. Shame on you.
Edited 2010-05-08 10:34 UTC
Just on the topic of suitability for the desktop, comparing Ubuntu with Windows, I have an illustrative anecdote that people may wish to comment on.
My sister-in-law and her son both bought new Windows laptops recently, one for work and the other for school. The laptops wouldn’t work with their existing inkjet printer, and they asked me if I could help. I googled the model of the inkjet printer, and of course the only driver available was for XP, and wouldn’t install on either of their new laptops. So they had to buy a new printer.
They asked me to buy a new printer, and then set it up for them. I got an inexpensive HP PSC, and they were happy with that, because it gave them a scanner also, which they did not expect to get. On opening the box, I found instructions to REFRAIN from plugging in the new printer, but rather I had first to put in a DVD and let it auto-run to install a driver. Luckily, both of the laptops did have a DVD drive, I would have been (temporarily) snookered if they had bought netbooks. After a lengthy process of installing numerous adware applets, finally it came time for the driver itself to install, and I had to plug in the printer. All went well, the new printer was recognised, and there was only a re-boot required and a few dozen nag screens to negotiate, and I had to clean up the desktop a bit of the icons that had been littered there by the install process.
That was for my sister-in-law’s laptop. I had to do it all over again for her son’s laptop.
It was a nice printer though (apart from all the adware) and inexpensive, so I also bought a new one for my own family. In contrast to Windows: I took it home, got it out of the box, put in the ink cartridges, plugged in the USB cable and power cord, turned it on, and 20 seconds later an Ubuntu dialog box popped up saying that the new printer was recognised, the correct driver was identified (it was already installed), the correct default page size for my country (A4) was selected, and the printer was now ready to print. The scanner function worked also. The HP utility worked as well, allowing me to check ink levels and clean ink heads and print test pages, etc. What is more, the same happened on three different machines … ready to print each time in 20 seconds even though the printer had never been connected to that machine before.
It is crystal clear to me which of these OS systems is better for use on the desktop for average people, and unequivocally it isn’t Windows.
Edited 2010-05-07 07:10 UTC
Just keep that tiring Linux advocacy going and the world will care. Right.
Remember to put some M-dollar-signs there to make it more convincing.
Ah, here we go with the Linux v. Windows debates again. *Sigh*. Are you people that insecure that you can’t just use what os works for you but have to argue the same old tired lines back and forth? The funny thing is that, of late, the Windows people seem to be getting more into it than the Linux people. I can remember a time not so long ago when it was the other way around. Amusing.
This, people will notice, has absolutely nothing to do with the point. A blatant attempt at deflection, nothing more.
The point being that the “desktop experience” with Ubuntu was vastly superior to that with Windows, in every way. Installing the OS, booting it, running it, updating it, upgrading it, keeping it free of malware, keeping it free of nags and from ads begging for your money, keeping it tidy and running smoothly, adding functionality … whatever you name, the experience is better with a good Linux distribution.
BTW, as far as updates goes … here in Australia, ISPs like to charge a fortune for bandwidth. This is offset somewhat by ISPs offering local mirrors for some files which do not count towards bandwidth usage. My own ISP is Internode, and this is their “unmetered” mirror site:
http://mirror.internode.on.net/
http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/
There is a choice of twenty or so Linux distributions mirrored here, so one can choose from any of those and updates can be downloaded “unmetered”.
There is no mirror, however, you will notice, for “Windows Updates”. These have to be downloaded from a Microsoft server.
In Australia, if you have a low data cap, such as for a mobile broadband USB modem for example, you simply cannot afford to keep that Windows system updated. It would cost you a fortune in Internet bandwidth fees.
Once again, the experience with Linux is vastly superior.
Edited 2010-05-07 10:19 UTC
What a load of utter crap you’re throwing, again. You very well know the only reason that you were forced to follow this excuse of a procedure isn’t because of Windows, nor drivers per-say, but because the crapware coming with the printer has to be installed before. Blame the real culprit, the printer manufacturer that cannot create a good driver without useless bloatware (windows printing management is fine and has been for like 10 years). I’m positive you knew that as well, you just couldn’t resist some easy windows bashing could you?
What’s also fun is that you’re very prone to discard anecdotes from other people about bad experiences on Linux, and yet still you jump on this bandwagon when you have one with windows
How ironic! I’m not even mentioning the blatant lies about how you had to “reboot 20+ times” to upgrade w/e windows version you were installing. Iirc it rebooted once when I installed windows 7, and I maybe had to do another one or 2 to _update_ graphic and various drivers.
Also, your “upgrade” protocol is easy to understand for computer geeks, but not the average user, face it. Fact is, anyone literate enough about computers to manage that upgrade protocol probably knows how to maintain windows installs clean. It’s actually easy, don’t install the random crap thrown at you, especially on borderline websites! You should try it. 9 months after 7, computer still boots as fast as it did, goes to and back from sleeps in mere seconds (and the “lag” is most likely due to my dual screen settings changing between my docks).
Ubuntu 10.04 is a fantastic release, and it does not need fanboism such as yours to get the place it deserves in the OS world. I honestly think Linux is readily usable for (most) desktops now. Steam and games like HoN coming along will only cater faster adoptions, but it does not condone blind and useless misinformation.
Actually, I don’t see many non-geeks actually doing an operating system upgrade. Typically, they get someone who knows computers to do it or sometimes they just buy a new computer. The fact is that os upgrades can go seriously south. I’ve seen it with Linux, with Windows, with OpenBSD, and with OS X. Upgrades can be tricky depending on the system and driver configuration. I know a lot of non-geeks, none of which have ever tried an os upgrade. Typically they pay me to do it.
That’s my point entirely, in the end saying “upgrade is easy” when you have to follow such protocols is just BS(regardless of the OS, I try and stay clear of upgrades but I only had an upgrade cd from Dell for my laptop…). It’s easy when you know what you’re doing, in which case you’re likely to know what you’re doing for about every OS around here.
It depends on how you go about it. Many users will boot their normal distribution, and the updater will inform them that a new upgrade is available for download (it will be installed “over” the existing OS). This sometimes works, but normally it is very problematic.
OTOH, boot a new upgrade LiveCD, re-format the partition where root “/” was previously, and re-use that same partition again as root “/”, and also re-use the separate /home partition as /home WITHOUT re-formatting it, and you will have a fresh clean install of your OS and applications in 20 minutes or so, with all of your user data and settings intact.
Edited 2010-05-07 12:15 UTC
This entire rant, and others like it, are mere deflection.
It is not fanboism to state facts.
The facts are these: Ubuntu is significantly easier to install, faster to boot, cleaner and faster to run, will work with far more hardware, is vastly easier to maintain (both in terms of update and in terms of keeping it malware free), and it has a huge array of available, excellent desktop application software that is vastly more than 99% of users will ever use or need.
The only area it is deficient is availability: most ordinary people will never be offered it, and they wouldn’t know how to get it even if they had heard of it and wanted to give it a try.
It doesn’t matter what I know or don’t know, what matters to an average person is that when they open the box, the first thing they pull out is a great big glossy colour sheet with “Easy install instructions” written on it in very bold letters. Also written very prominently, very bold, is the dire warning “DO NOT CONNECT THE PRINTER FIRST”.
Of course, following these instructions is the very way to go about having a fairly miserable install experience.
Mind you, NOT following the instructions and actually plugging in the printer will send Windows Vista and Windows 7 off on a driver hunt to Microsoft’s site, which will cost you download bandwidth bucks (at least it will in my country). And after the driver is installed, either way, there is a need to re-boot to get it to work.
Either way, the Ubuntu experience ... plug it in, turn it on and 20 seconds later (without re-boot, without inserting any DVDs, and without any downloads) the printer is configured and ready to print … this is a far better experience in anyone’s language.
Edited 2010-05-07 12:43 UTC
Don’t forget to add condescending remarks and anecdotal stories involving relatives. They should be mixed in with a few disingenuous statements for maximum effect.
But rule #1 when it comes to Linux advocacy is to never admit that an area needs work.
I have one of those HP printers too (DeskJet F2400) and I was pleasantly surprised when I put Ubuntu 10.04 on a partition and had left the printer plugged in. I never got a dialog at all, so I assumed I’d have to do some tinkering. I opened up the Printer utility and there it sat, saying “ready”! I printed a test page with no problem at all, then I opened Simple Scan again expecting to be disappointed. I put a business card on the glass and clicked the scan button, and soon enough saw the card on my screen. I was simply floored!
Even on my Leopard install, I had to use the crappy HP software to be able to print and scan, so I give the Ubuntu team major props for doing something far better than even the great Mac OS.
Ubuntu is great for this kind of thing. Absolutely fantastic.
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/?Qwd=./KDE4_desktop&Qif=kubuntu_lu…
OTOH, there is an attraction to having a cutting-edge-right-up-to-date-yet-rarely-breaks distribution like Arch. Arch takes a bit of tinkering (for things like setting up a new printer) where Ubuntu makes it easy, but IMO Arch has got Ubuntu beat for being super-slick.
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/?Qwd=./KDE4_desktop&Qif=my-arch-de…
It works amazingly well, and very fast, considering how much stuff you can install at the very-latest version.
Edited 2010-05-07 13:50 UTC
It has to be said that drivers for hp all-in-one are such a pos that they cannot be described in words. Requiring .nyet, a whopping 350mb download, completely unstable and using an unfathombale number of ports to communicate with the networked printers – but still not being able to overcome a simple router
This is a long term release. So your good for the next three years.
Personally I always do a clean install putting the home on a different partition makes it easy. I also always clean install in Windows, which is less easy to keep settings move mail etc.
Edited 2010-05-07 08:39 UTC
Until you want to upgrade software that requires a newer release or a trip to the command line.
Linux is not ready for the typical user until it can handle upgrades properly. That means being able to update a browser in a two year old release without having to open a command prompt. Users should not be told to stick with their current browser version if they want stability. Browsers need to be updated for security reasons and users should not have to choose between security and stability.
Who feeds you all this utter FUD? Let me guess … Windows fansites?
https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa
What is this guff about a command-line?
(Hint – copy and paste the bolded text above directly into the “Add source” GUI dialog).
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu#Adding%20R…
Edited 2010-05-07 14:50 UTC
Well here is some of that command line guff:
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-openoffice-3.0.0-on-ubuntu…
A comment from that tutorial:
Linux just plain sucks at upgrades compared to Windows and OSX. I’m sorry if you can’t see that.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The distros could build systems that keep the applications independent of the OS.
Such a mechanism is in place already: private repositories (e.g. backports, ubuntu ppa…).
For example I currently keep getting ever more glorious version of chrome beta even if I’m on a stable distribution. An openoffice PPA could do the same thing (I don’t know if there is one already).
Repository approach makes implementing custom solutions unnecessary (e.g. no need for “google updater”, or programs checking for the website on their own).
Even if an application was a hard dependency of some other application vital to the OS, you can provide a new package with different package & binary name, completely independent of the rest of the OS.
Trouble is that PPAs need someone to maintain them, and more often than not it is not the one who created the software doing that. Personally, I think if every Linux software developer standardized on one distribution, we’d have all this ironed out already. The PPA would be maintained by the original developer(s), and new releases would be available asap. It won’t happen of course, but it’s a nice dream. We need to seriously think of these not as distributions but as separate operating systems. We should standardize on one of them, the community will keep up the others if there is demand. As I said, I’m dreaming again, but if such a thing did happen we’d have something seriously awesome.
https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive/ppa
Having pointed this out, you are better off upgrading to Lucid if you want recent versions (provided that Lucid works when you test it out via the liveCD).
This is trivial to do as long as you have /home on a separate partition.
Mind you … even if you didn’t install Hardy with /home on a separate partition, if you do have enough spare space you can always make a new partition and then copy all of /home on to it, and THEN re-install Lucid.
Or, alternatively, you could just backup /home and /etc (perhaps on to a device like this: http://www.ccpu.com.au/show_prod.php?class_id=disk-hdd-lap&prod_id=… ), wipe your hard disk, install Luicd with a separate /home partition, and then restore /home from your backup.
As a bonus, you get ALL your applications, not just OpenOffice, upgraded to the latest version (a feat that would cost you a fortune with commercial Windows applications), AND you get a cheap portable USB hard disk.
Edited 2010-05-08 10:17 UTC
There is an update-manager icon in the menu which works.
Updates on Ubuntu are a lot quicker than on the windows platform. (windows xp takes forever to scan and download new updates).
The last couple of years Ubuntu is pretty usable desktop environment.
Only adobe flash support sucks a bit.
I think it’s time to stop comparing recent Linux oses to XP. XP is nine years old, Ubuntu 10.04 is a week or so old. Compare it to Windows 7 instead of XP in the interest of being fair.
That being said, your point does remain valid if not more so. At least on *NIX systems, I know that once an update is installed it *is* installed. There’s very little that I hate more than when I shut down Windows 7 and I’m waiting five minutes for it to install updates before the damn thing will power off. I wish I could tell the thing to hurry up cause I want to go home!
And then it sometimes wants to “finish” the installation of an update upon boot-up too, never mind that it just supposedly did that same update on shutdown. Arrrrgh! At least on *NIX once an update is successfully installed, it is installed for sure. Even if I have to reboot, for say a kernel update, the new kernel is already there and I don’t have to wait a millennium at the shutdown and boot-up stages. Oh and in the meantime I can use my system happily on the current kernel or GNOME or whatever core update asked me to restart, unlike in w7 where it gives you this annoying nag screen every hour.
Totally agree. This is a complete deal breaker for me, as well. I refuse to use an OS that requires me to upgrade it every 6 months just to install a newer browser release, new version of OO.org, updated music player, etc…
Edited 2010-05-08 06:20 UTC
That’s OK, so you won’t mind using Ubuntu Lucid LTS then, because it DOESN’T require that of you.
Oh really, so every upgrade of popular software will be automatically available for this release for the next 3 years, will it? I won’t have to resort to the command line, fuss with a bunch of special repositories, etc?
You’re right, it’s hard to understand to me, using Vista on a Fujitsu Siemens laptop with 2.0 Ghz Core2 Duo and 2GB of RAM, Vista is still not usable 3 minutes after I switch the power button. Even when resuming from suspend to disk, I still have to wait for more than 90 seconds. Such a pain that I considered installing XP but most drivers are provided only for Vista…
Just bought a new HDD that should be delivered tomorrow for reviving an old Acer notebook. I intend to have a Linux install in addition to XP. Two questions though:
– is that 15-second boot of Ubuntu a reality? if so, I’ve found my distribution.
– how should I partition that HDD? Number, primary/extended, … I need some advice.
I have similar specs to your machine, in desktop format: Core2Duo 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM etc. Once Grub2 has started it’s about 18 seconds to a working GNOME desktop with no HDD grinding. Granted, my dog-slow BIOS boot sequence in itself takes nearly 20 seconds, so my total boot time with any OS sucks. But I can honestly say that on this machine, the only OS that beats Ubuntu is Haiku, and that by only a second or two.
Also, Ubuntu and any OS other than Leopard live on a slow PATA drive, which could be negatively affecting my boot time. Leopard refuses to allow any other OS on the SATA drive and I didn’t have a spare SATA for the other OSes; when I do finally get another SATA I’m sure Ubuntu will boot a few seconds faster.
Edited 2010-05-07 11:21 UTC
It depends on the machine of course, but even my netbook can boot Lucid in 15 seconds, and my desktop is less than 10.
The simplest scheme is this:
First partition: bootable, NTFS (for Windows), install windows first, but use only up to half of the disk space for this
After installing Windows, then re-boot with a LiveCD, and install a good Linux distribution (Lucid will do) in the unused disk area.
Second partition: ext3 or ext4, mount point = /, say 10GB-20GB
Third partition: swap, 2 * RAMsize (i.e. 2GB if you have 1GB RAM)
Fourth partition: ext3 or ext4, mount point = /home, the rest of the disk
If there are to be only four partitions, it doesn’t matter if they are all primary partitions, because you can have up to four.
If you prefer to have a lot of alternate OSes, you will need more than four partitions, so make the NTFS partition a bootable primary partition, and the rest all logical partitions, and you can have as many as you like.
Another trick is to leave the largest partition mounted separately (I make it /mnt/local) and have /home mounted along with /root. On the /mnt/local disk, create an ordinary folder for each user, and sub-folders under that for files, and then put symlinks to the /mnt/local/username/Folders in each username’s ~/ (home). This way, each OS can “see” the same data and folders, but there can be separate user config info for each OS. This way, you can have a GNOME desktop and another boot for a KDE desktop, and they won’t interfere with each other.
If you install a filesystem driver for Windows, or you make the /mnt/local disk formatted NTFS or FAT32, then all OSes can see the user data files areas without stepping on one another’s toes for config settings.
Edited 2010-05-07 11:37 UTC
Thank you lemur2 for the advice.
In fact, I went home this midday and the HDD was in my mailbox… I’ll start installing this week-end. Thanks!
That said, last time I bothered to install a *buntu it defaulted to one partition for everything. Does it still default to this brain-dead behavior?
Unfortunately, yes it does. I’m sure they do that for simplicity’s sake, and the fact that a lot of Ubuntu users are switchers who don’t know enough or don’t care to mess with multiple partitions.
I’ve always preferred a “root, /boot, /home” setup as a good balance between simplicity and ease of upgrade/restore. I’ve been doing that since the late ’90s when I first started tinkering with Slackware and RedHat.
That said, when I’m just testing out a distro I let it do its default scheme, both to save time and to get a feel for how the developers prefer things.
Well that is bad. The user type should not matter, sounds more like developer failure.
There would be no need for users to mess with it or make it any less simple, having the installer automatically set up a sane partition scheme. Most user would not notice or need to know, other than getting the benefit of better data safety when upgrading or needing system rescue.
Welcome to Arch! I’ve been using it since 2006 in my desktop with just one reinstall (my own fault) and since 2008 in my laptop (just reinstalled to change to 64 bits).
And I’m really thinking of giving a Ubuntu livecd to my family members so they can start playing with Linux without too much compromise. Would you recommend Ubuntu or Kubuntu? I use KDE myself (can’t even imagine me using Gnome) but maybe Gnome’s implementation is better than KDE’s for the *buntus?
Ubuntu’s focus is GNOME, and basically Kubuntu is treated like a poor second cousin.
Having said that, Kubuntu Lucid is a lot better than previous Kubuntu’s have been.
Ubuntu’s strength is user-friendliness, but it is really quite heavily a GNOME-centric distribution.
So, if I wanted user-friendly and KDE, I’d probably opt for PCLinuxOS. If I wanted LTS-equivalent-stable, Debian apt repositories and KDE, (and user-friendly wasn’t quite so important) I’d probably opt for MEPIS 8.5.
If I want cutting edge KDE and I didn’t care about user-friendliness, then I would go with Arch … which is what I have done.
I’m a bit curious as to what would cause you to lose USB during an upgrade. I don’t doubt you, it’s just something I have never experienced.
Not really GRUB’s fault that the system won’t boot after a partial upgrade. I often wonder why Ubuntu doesn’t us LVM by default – just think if you could take snapshot before an upgrade and easily revert it if the upgrade fails.
I have IOGEAR keyboard switch, sharing keyboard/mouse/monitor between two computers. Without upgrade it was working fine, but, I guess, it was replaced some files during upgrade or, maybe, disabled some services, so when I’ve switched back, it could not reenable (rediscover?) keyboard and mouse.
Windows 7 uses transaction to switch all files at once when doing updates. In Linux I’ve experienced several times, that system is getting unstable during upgrade, because files and libraries are in inconsistent state.
Edited 2010-05-07 21:12 UTC
It’s a bit sad they got rid of the earthy tones. While I know they need to modernise the GUI, the brown and oranges nuances gave Ubuntu its own sense of identity. This is not about changing colour schemes in the settings, but being able to recognise a particular brand.
Please refer to my ostentatious example:
Say I walk into a room and see a laptop sitting on table across from where I was standing, and the GUI displayed browns and oranges – I would go ‘Far out man! You are running Ubuntu! Right on brother!’ *high five* *does a chicken dance*.
Now, if I did not have the knowledge that a new Ubuntu had been released, and I observed the same laptop – I might go “Looks like you running GNOME hill billy, hmm the GUI might be the love child of Mac OS X and Vista. Still looks mighty pretty though…’
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that the devolpers moved to a new scheme, I just think they have lost something in the way of brand recognition.
I completely agree.
I’d like to add that while I like dark themes, I object to dark borders and decorations mixed with plain gray window interiors. It looks half-done.
Edited 2010-05-07 04:23 UTC
I have been using 10.4 for a while without any problems, until one hour ago, that is. I updated the system, and now GDM will not start and can only login to a terminal.
I had no choice but to fall back to my ultra-reliable Haiku pre-alpha 2 install to search the web for a solution.
Hmmm… who was telling me that Haiku needed a Linux-style package management system?
Edited 2010-05-07 00:21 UTC
It turned out to be that in my attempt to remove Evolution (I hate this damn bloated program), the ubuntu-desktop package got removed too (and I did not notice). Why on earth would uninstalling an email client remove the desktop components?
And that is one of the things I dislike about metapackages. If you remove a piece of the metapackage, the whole of it can/may be removed. It has happened to me on my occasions. Never had it affect the stability of my system, but it has removed things I wanted to keep.
I haven’t installed it yet. I have just been trying the live CD and building up courage to replace my trusty old Hardy workhorse. Lucid is stunningly beautiful, on the other hand live CD is excruciatingly slow. But then the live CD’s always are slow as I remember, right back to Dapper.
However in comparison at the same time I have been trying the sidux XFce live disk and it is blazingly fast even on CD. Nowhere near as pretty but very functional and everything works. Both of these are the 64 bit version. I have a 32 bit Ubuntu running on my three year old Celeron based current system. However it is EM64T and running these two live CD’s shows its 64 bit capability really does work.
So what am I going to do? I guess I will have to install them both.
Mandriva is much better than ubuntu. It has both Gnome and KDE official support, an integrated and true “control panel”, it has both livecd and DVD with traditional graphical and text installers, 6 months development cycle and it has also a good hardware support and detection.
OpenSuse is similar to Mandriva and both are better than ubuntu.
I have to disagree. I just switched to Lucid after using Mandriva for a few months (previously, I had switched to Mandriva as Ubuntu’s ath9k drivers hadn’t quite stabilized yet), and boy am I glad to be done with that. Credit where credit is due: the control panel is nice, although I think in terms of design it is very amateurishly done and poorly integrated with the desktop (there were even some grammatical errors, if I recall correctly). The rest of it, however, drove me insane. Putting the laptop to sleep would occasionally result in random ext4 errors, dumping me to console; on that note, the console sometimes would just stop working altogether. When you brought up Mandriva’s “6 month release cycle” you forgot to mention how the update manager pesters you almost daily with updates, and not just one or two but sometimes ten or twenty. Certainly not the path to a stable system.
No complaints about Lucid so far =).
The latest Ubuntu has been released. It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. It does have a few problems, some serious, but they’ll be fixed in the next version which will be revolutionary… blah blah blah
Just like every version of Windows or OSX.
New versions of Windows and OSX aren’t released every 6 months but more importantly they both provide a stable abi so you can expect a driver to work for the life of a system.
But it doesn’t work the other way around. If you upgrade a Windows version, but you have some peripherals that are out of production (say a printer, your mobile phone and a digital camera) … then you are in peril that the OEM of the peripheral hasn’t made a new version of the driver.
Several times I have been asked to get someone’s existing printer to work with their new Windows laptop … and they somehow have a lot of trouble believing that their out-of-production printer that still works just fine with their Windows XP desktop just doesn’t have any Windows 7 driver made for it, so it won’t work with their new laptop.
This is when I tell them they can either pay me for the time spent researching the issue (I don’t charge much as I have a day job but it does add up) or they can buy a new printer for ~$40 that has more functionality than their old one and is guaranteed to work with Vista or 7.
So far I’ve only had one person choose to stick with the old device, and I suspect that is because I wasn’t charging him — it was my barber and I got two month’s worth of haircuts for the trouble.
Aww, that explains the haircut on your photo…
(Just kidding, could let that pass on…)
Hehe. Yeah, obviously I’m not Ted Cassidy, but my nickname in high school and at a few past jobs was “Lurch” because of my height and build. I didn’t mind, as he was always my favorite character from the show. I figured it would be a good avatar.
Oh so once you get your wireless adapter working with Linux you can be assured that it will always work?
Nice review, I was waiting for Lucid Lynx to ‘stabilize’ before I upgraded. After reading your article, I think I am ready to upgrade.
“It loads at around 10 seconds on my hard drive-based laptops, and in about 15 seconds on my SSD-based ones.”
Why does your SSD based computers take longer to load, is this a mistake?
It depends what SSD disk is used, for example Intel ones are fastest (check random write I/O operations) while most of SSDs (OCZ/Kingston/…) are really bad in random write I/O operations, check benchmarks, I am sure that Intel SSD will be faster then any hdd, but a ‘random’ SSD may not be faster at all.
Also, from ‘random’ SSDs drives, SSDs with SandForce 1500/1200 controller are rather close to Intel when it comes to performance.
Lucid on my MythTV box is quite nice. Not only did it clear up my remote control problems (it now uses devinput by default), but also remote input is very snappy now.
As a matter of fact, responsiveness is much improved overall. The stupid input delay is gone after the box sits for a while. Video playback and live TV starts very quickly as well.
The only problem I’m having is HD playback is very glithy. My computer was barely capable of handling HD in the first place, but now it’s unwatchable. I enabled NvAGP, which was turned off somewhere along the way. That made 720p watchable. Now I’m working on 1080i. I suspect it is an ext4 problem.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a file system issue. I’m having similar problems with HD playback. On Leopard (on an SATA drive) and on Windows (PATA drive) 1080p drops one or two frames every few seconds, and I can only tell by using the Inspector during playback. On Ubuntu, installed to the PATA drive, 1080p is nearly unwatchable. It drops half the frames every second. This is all on a C2D 2.2GHz with a GeForce 8400GS. Granted, that setup is barely enough for 1080p in the first place, but it does work on other OSes.
This is the one, for the most part, that grandma could use unattended. The default theme needs a cohesive colour scheme but it’s a minor thing compared to the functionality with this release. Whether it’s the year of desktop Linux or not, I wouldn’t guess but this is good.
It’s so quick that I’m not thinking that I’m waiting for the thing to do something. It reminds me of when operating systems were lighter and could run on a Motorola 68020 or 80286 to the bounds of free RAM.
For me, there is a singular problem and that’s my tethered mobile phone internet connection. It’s recognised and the setup is simple since my service provider is in the list, but DNS entries were not added by default and so I’m not getting anywhere with it automagically. I’ll fix it later since it hasn’t been the supporting machine anyway.
That’s flawless in contrast to earlier releases from 7.04 onward. Everyone involved should be proud.
I installed it on my netbook on which it runs fine. Add the window-picker-applet to the top panel in the middle and you can basically remove the bottom panel. Maximus lets me run (almost
) everything maximized without title bar 
.
9.10 disturbed me more than this version, so for me it is an improvement, although I really dislike the default theme. I have the idea the colors are choosen at random or something. The Radiance theme suits me better, but that also needs improvement as the mail notification bar in pidgin is just black text on a nearly black background.
A lot of settings need gconf-editor, but just like you I still haven’t found the setting to remove text on buttons. I must admit this time it still didn’t disturb me that much.
As I always perform clean installs and I take the time to put my documents back I’m working with the cable, so no idea yet on the atheros wireless card. I hope I don’t need to update it myself to make it work properly.
Changes are huge that I will be using this version for a long time as I really don’t see the point how ‘windicators’ would improve my experience.
I have also tried the new Ubuntu 10.04 (though, on a desktop class machine) and I have been pleasantly surprised by its snappiness.
As I use a Kingston SSD as boot device that supports TRIM command, I’d recommend to install the 2.6.33 kernel that takes that SSD-friendly option into active usage. Ubuntu unfortunately ships with 2.6.32-something.
What are your laptop specs? I have 2 laptops, Dell Latitude D630 and Dell XPS M1530 and I can’t get nowhere near 10 seconds.
First let me say – This is a good release, boots incredibly quickly, very easy to set up and all my hardware worked fine even getting the surround sound to work on my desktop was not too fiddly.
However, on instillation on my desktop with an nvidia graphic card and the recommended proprietary driver installed, I could get to tty. Bad but resolved after the first update.
Proxy server settings are inconsistency applied with sudo so for example installing the flashplayer pluggin nonfree with synaptic or sudo apt-get install fails when the installer is pulling down the application. However, sudo -i then apt-get install works fine. No doubt this niggle will be resolved soon
I didn’t read all the comments, but you can definitely change this in gconf still -> the key being /desktop/gnome/interface/toolbar_style (I just change it to icons)
As for the mail notitifcation thing, as someone mentioned you can just uninstall indicator-messages.
Think again – it happened to me. I had to create an entire xorg.conf file. Not nice.
Interestingly, this is the first Ubuntu release I haven’t had to create or edit one. For the first time, the Nvidia control panel correctly identifies my monitor and the Auto settings work. Though, I still reduce the refresh rate to comply with my LCD’s recommended 60Hz; this sharpens up the text and on an LCD the low refresh doesn’t give me headaches like it does on CRTs.
It is fast, it is beautiful, and what is most important to me: mobile broadband works out of the box (with correct APN).
Seems like Vista never really took off. Poor thing. For me, this was the worst timesharing M$ OS since Windows 95, which was even better than Vista in all aspects but BSODs.
On topic (I mean “on quote”): maybe (s)he’s basing that on the fact so many Linux users just don’t browse the web.
Windows 95 used a junky 16 bit kernel and didn’t have true multitasking.
The core of 7 is hardly different from Vista. Vista had problems with its initial release but was fixed before SP2. However the tech press wanted to keep bashing it and MS decided to release a new OS instead of trying to fix Vista’s image problem.
I must have asked a dozen people exactly what was wrong with Vista and yet none could give an explanation. They just “knew” it was bad even though they couldn’t even specify any problems.
I would then show them a benchmark and they would get even more confused. How is this even possible when we have been told so many times that Vista is bad?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-performance,2442-3.ht…
Windows 7 is better than Vista but to say that Vista sucks in comparison just shows ignorance. Most of the changes in 7 are superficial.
Edited 2010-05-08 03:22 UTC
Oh man! Get at least your facts straight, if you are speaking against Windows.
Windows 95 had a 32 bit pre-emptive kernel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95
I like Linux, but I also like Windows, just use the best tool for the job.
If you are going to bash Windows at least learn how to do it properly. Oh man!
The 32-bit Windows API on DOS-Windows 95/98/ME is built on top of the 16-bit Windows kernel. Much of the functionality of the 32-bit API DLLs (kernel32.dll, user32.dll, gdi32.dll, advapi32.dll, and so forth) is provided by thunking from 32-bit to 16-bit and calling into the 16-bit Windows kernel, grabbing a global mutual exclusion semaphore known as “Win16Mutex” (that prevents multiple threads from executing in the 16-bit Windows kernel concurrently) for the duration.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/dos-window…
Pre-emptive multitasking was only for 32 bit code. 16 bit programs were common and forced the system to multitask cooperatively. They also shared their own address space.
Edited 2010-05-09 07:13 UTC
I will say this for Ubuntu… the live CD came up and detected my wireless card and found all the nearby routers. It also informed me that there was a driver for my Nvidia card that I could install.
The Fedora 12 live CD did not detect my wireless card and of course it doesn’t have the nice message suggesting installing an alternate driver. That’s fine, it’s in the documentation, with a warning that the drivers could cause system instability.
Ubuntu has become very user friendly. It always was, but it just keeps getting more so.
I am Ubuntu user for many years, this new version has a lot going for it. However I along with many others have had issues with RaLink RT2860 Wireless.
I did my original install using EXT4 file system, and I simply could not connect to my local network, I did a new fresh install using EXT3 file system, and on my first attempt I connected. Though worth noting I do have occasional issue connecting. In previous releases 9.04 and 9.10 this was a non-issue it simply worked out of the box.
As days go by I am adding a small list of changes and or issues. But overall the product is polished, the software repository has grown, and the experience is quite satisfying.
Edited 2010-05-07 19:12 UTC
Not sure what the filesystem would have to do with the Wifi card. I also have a Ralink RT2860-based card in one of my systems, and to get it to work right I had to install linux-backports-modules-wireless-lucid-generic. I had to do this in Karmic as well. Ralink drivers in general seem to be rather hit or miss, one version is stable and the next version isn’t. At this point Atheros are doing a better job with their Linux drivers than Ralink, though it used to be the other way around.
Same as it ever was.
We need a review of how well an OS works for someone, *three months* after the install.
How did it perform after updating?
What did you have to work around?
What is missing that you wish was there?
etc.
>We need a review of how well an OS works for someone, *three months* after the install.
As mentioned in the review, 2 of the laptops were upgraded, and 2 were a fresh install. So obviously, Ubuntu does work after installation just fine, generally speaking. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be upgrading an already working installation.
>How did it perform after updating?
Already discussed.
>What did you have to work around?
Already discussed.
>What is missing that you wish was there?
Already discussed.
I wonder if you actually read the article, or you just brushed it off, or you’re just trolling.
Trolling. Judging by fanboy_fanboy’s comment style on other articles, I suspect Rockwell might be back under a different guise.
Nah, I didn’t see “freetard” anywhere.
And judging by your general lack of anything worthwhile to say in any of your comments, I think a mentally challenged four-year-old is back under the guise of darknexus.
Or always was darknexus.
I find it amazing that you can install and use an OS that’s not even a week old three months from now, and then write a review of it based on three month’s worth of updates/usage/etc. … last week.
Edited 2010-05-10 22:16 UTC
Does anyone know if there is a big list of what works and what doesn’t?
I think it’d be great if you could look up your hardware, and see how well it works before you attempt to install ubuntu (or linux in general).
If it exists, great, can someone point me in the right direction? If it doesn’t, why not?
LiveCD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livecd
The install disk of Ubuntu is a liveCD. “see how well it works before you attempt to install ubuntu” is PRECISELY what a liveCD enables you to do, except that loading programs off a liveCD is a lot slower than hard disk, so running a livCD won’t give you a good idea of the speed that is possible if you were to install to a hard disk.
Running a LiveCD does, however, let you know exactly if the OS will work on your hardware, BEFORE you install it to hard disk.
This is by far the best LTS release Ubuntu has done.
Thanks, in no small part, to the maturity of many of the projects it includes, schools, governments, and businesses who need a reliable and feature-full operating system should test Ubuntu as it is very likely to meet the needs of a large number of users.
I have installed it on a variety of systems with very promising results. And things should only get better as any remaining edges are polished through updates or a re-spin of the original release.
Just installed it on my Samsung 2Gb netbook, no problems.
Fast bootup, snappy (noticeably faster than Win7).
I’ll stick with this one.
I can only say that Ubuntu “Lucid Lynx” 10.04 LTS is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.osdiscs.co.uk
Great review,
I have more confidence with the upgrade method since my Jaunty to Karmic experience was good, so I jumped in and performed upgrades on my two laptops and two mythtv computers.
Went really well on Dell M1730 laptop, just minor annoyance with the panel background not a smooth gray colour for some reason.
Second laptop (Toshiba A200) had hanging issues, had to hit enter on live cd start, F6, choose ACPI=OFF. This is similair to Virtual Box install where I had to switch off ACPI setting to stop the live cd hang and OS hang once installed.
First mythtv upgrade went well, couple of issues, any new startup applications added failed to start. I had to work around this at command line by editing out newer settings in the job found in ~/.config/autostart. Found mythweb not working, had to uninstall and reinstall apache2 package to fix problem with apache2 not starting.
Second mythtv upgrade went really bad. I had to do backup and do a heap of new installs to figure out why I was getting a black screen of death after bootup. Long story short, had to change /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf from IFACE=lo” -> IFACE=eth0 to fix runlevel unknown state causing failure of old sysv init scripts. Also when running it would just drop to the black screen, had to apply lucic-preposed updates to stabilise it. My thinking is that I had heaps of problem due to the age of this computer.
Cheers,
Homanta
NOt to be a spoilsport or anything, but doesn’t switching off ACPI on a laptop disable a lot of the power managing features? Well, unless it’s an older laptop that uses APM instead, but I’m not sure how old a laptop like that would run modern Ubuntu anyway, or modern GNOME for that matter.
As I said in earlier posts, I intended to use this release on an old Acer laptop with this config: XP Home edition SP1, Mobile Athlon 796Mhz, 512MB RAM, brand new Samsung HM160HC 160GB. The drive is partitioned as suggested by lemur2: Windows system, win swap, hidden win clone, linux, linux swap and all-OS data (15, 2, 15, 15, 2, 100 GB).
I’m bringing this old computer back to life for serving torrents, test some software development tools, maybe do some occasional web browsing and archiving.
Both Ubuntu 10.04 and XP **SP3** are up and running.
– VERY pleasant surprise: two-finger scrolling is activated on the touchpad. I did not even think that old laptop would support it.
– Another VERY pleasant surprise: the builtin RTL8180 Wifi card connected to my network which uses WPA2 with AES encryption. After discovering that, I tried the same under XP but never found the right driver even for WPA/TKIP: it just can’t connect. I didn’t find anyone who succeeded in using WPA on Windows with that card.
– The sound works without any tweaking. GOOD.
– Deactivating the touchpad while using the keyboard is a great feature.
– Touchpad acceleration is not an acceleration, it’s a speed: no matter how fast your finger moves, the touchpad distance always yields the same screen distance. BAD.
– There’s no way to set the timeout on the multi-boot screen. OK, I won’t die because of that.
– The multi-boot sets Ubuntu as default. OK, why not. But there’s NO way for a lay user to say “I want my original OS to be the default option”. What are those choices? I had to **very reluctantly** change some 40_custom file in etc/grub.d… after searching the web and realizing that the “menu.lst” people wrote about doesn’t exist anymore. The syntax seems to have changed and now the “other os” options are given by a script! I had to copy the “Windows XP Edition Familiale (on dev/sda1)” entry from a file (grub.cfg) which is itself a generated file, duplicate the entry, rename it to “WindowsXP” and put the name as the value for “default”. How is my mother going to do that?
– Do Linux users usually need such a large font? I realized the desktop env was probably Gnome, which I’ve never liked.
– I went into the “Logithèque” (application store?), searching for KDE. Dind’t find it. Seems like I’ll need to download, burn and install KUbuntu, which would be a joke, right? If confirmed, the only reason I wouldn’t kick Linux out of the disk is grub having taken control of the boot: I don’t want to reinstall XP and all updates. I remember my student years when the Linux installs at the university offered the choice of the desktop environment from the login screen. What happened to that?
– Slower to boot than the original XP SP1. XP SP3 took 45s with the following apps launched at startup: Avira Antivir, ClipDiary, RocketDock (with 15 icons) and Oxygenator (a very well-thought 1999 memory usage indicator) and the RT73 USB connected to my wireless network. Ubuntu: 32s to show the desktop. That’s just BAD. And I did not even disable the Windows services that are useless to me or the bloated software package that PC manufacturers feel compelled to add. I shouldn’t complain since Vista takes 3 minutes without reaching the same readiness.
Summary: awesome detection of hardware and associated capabilities: no driver issues at all, everything worked with ZERO tweaking. Ultimate configuration options for the touchpad. Excellent disk management utility which is in sharp contrast with the overall UI experience. BUT Not user-friendly at all (reminiscent of my first encounter with Linux in 1995 or 1996):
1- As long as using Linux means “having to mess with config files and scripts”, I don’t think it’s usable. I’m a software engineer and I hate having to do that. My mom is a secretary and her computing world is probably limited to Office, IE and Yahoo Messenger/MSN/Skype. How is she ever going to understand that? It being free doesn’t mean all.
2- the ability to change all options should be given and easily accessed. The level of configuration offered by Mac OS X is just despicable, no matter how great an OS it is. Windows is not much better at least up to Vista, never used 7. I don’t use Linux and probably won’t in the next months, but I do wish the Linux community never ever falls in that same state of mind.
Rant: Mac OS X is for my 6-year old nephew, Windows is for my sister and Linux is still for the geek, knowing geek > (me+much much good will). But all of them are disappointing when it comes to speed. With all the power in today’s laptops, high-clock speeds, multi-core architectures, abysmal-deep pipelines, why can’t OSes be just fast? With all the developers, why can’t we be granted a better control over configuration/options? I regretted being forced to use Vista on a new laptop, I regretted upgrading from 10.5 to Snow Leopard on my work laptop and Ubuntu 10.04 doesn’t display the hyped speed. What’ wrong with the OSes wrt speed? Maybe Thom or Kroc can make that the topic of a future article?
Just for the anecdote, when I bought the Acer laptop in 2003, I had a 1999 133Mhz Olivetti running W95. I remember making the experiment of starting both laptops at the same moment, the Olivetti booted faster than the Acer running XP. Office 95 launched faster than Office 2003 on the Acer. I wouldn’t go back using it but anyway, too bad the AC adapter went dead.
I’m waiting for a real revolution in reactivity of systems today, including mobile ones. When hearing that a Palm Pre takes a ludicrous 100+ seconds before booting, I start thinking that the revolution may not happen in my lifetime (unless a quantic computer comes to life, but I’m pretty sure hardware makers and developers will find a way to screw it up). My 6110 Navigator takes 20 seconds including the Nokia animation and the carrier’s animation, and I can start dialing a number right away but it still seems too long. More than my Amstrad CPC 6128 in its time.
actually there is, you have to edit /etc/default/grub. But I’d say this is clearly an option for advanced users.
Well that’s still miles ahead of Windows which doesn’t allow you to have any OS beside itself. Tell me how your mother is going to install Windows and have Ubuntu still boot?
I’ve just tried and you’re correct in the software center finding the kde desktop is a bit of a pain. But you can always open a proper package manager (synaptic) and you will find KDE. No need to burn and install kubuntu. Actually the package you have to install in Ubuntu is Kubuntu-desktop IIRC.
So Ubuntu is 13s quicker than XP SP3 and that’s bad? Considering that almost all the software it loads is 5-10 years more recent? And comparing it to an empty XP SP1 is not really fair. Although I have to say 32s sounds quite long, but it seems your PC is quite old too.
You’re kidding right? You’re trying to change some pretty advanced options (yes I consider boot-order, boot time-out and installing a new desktop environment advanced), things that are not even possible in Windows or OSX or only with editing of the Registry, but because you have to edit config files under Linux Linux is not user-friendly at all? How about a fair comparison?
You cannot change advanced options in Windows either without editing the registry. Why should very advanced options be made available in the GUI? It would just become totally cluttered.
It seems to me like you want your cake and eat it too. On the one hand you want all the advanced options available in a GUI. A good GUI how you like it and all the “user-friendly” programs available, but on the other hand you want instant boot times and super fast behaviour on a 7 year old laptop. You can create a Linux installation which would boot in 5s or so, but you’d have to forgo all that user-friendlyness and do a lot of manual tweaking (and the GUI environment would also not be the latest and greatest).