Ubuntu Linux 4.1, released yesterday, is the one of the first distributions to ship with the newly released Gnome 2.8. OSDir has taken a number of screenshots. PPCNerds.org also features
an Ubuntu slideshow. We featured an interview with Jeff Waugh of the Ubuntu team yesterday.
Ubuntu Screenshots Galore!
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In menu screenshots, I can’t see CD burner. Does it ever contain one?
I’m running it at work right now, pretty slick so far. Think of a rather up to date debian with some bleeding edge feature, and where alot of things you might not expect configured for you, configured already. I wonder though, can you add debian sid or sarge apt sources to your list? The repos it points to are decent, but obviously not as extensive as debian proper. As to gnome 2.8, very nice, I like where this is going.
The version of the preview is 4.10 not 4.1, this comes from 2004 and October (when the final release of warty will be available).
It looks really nice and it’s definitely up to date, but I’m holding judgement on it. It’s all well and good to put out a distribution like Fedora that gets updated episodically, but that’s not what I’m looking for. The true test is whether they will be able to maintain an extensive and up-to-date repository.
OK, scratch my comment about not being an extensive apt repository, uncomment the universe option in the sources list, you get between 12 and 13 thousand packages! Wow.
Ilyak: It includes nautilus-cd-burner, which integrates really nicely. It pops up a window to drop files in when you insert a blank disk, you can burn images with a right click in the file manager, etc.
D’Arcy: See our FAQ on http://wiki.ubuntu.com/
Anonymous: Sure it’ll be up to date. It’s based on Debian’s “sid” development branch with the latest software, and we synchronise with GNOME’s release process. Every six months you’ll have the best of the best, and if you run the devel version, you’ll can test the best of the best every day. 🙂
I really like the gtk theme (“Human” ??), maybe someone has a link to download it..
i really love that idea of replacing the “actions” menu for the computer menu, containing both the computer and actions.
anyone knows if this is a ubuntu-only feature or something new in the standard gnome 2.8 release?
Just curious, I went to their website (looks good, well organized) and tried to find some info re min hardware requirements. With all that talk about being accessible as possible, I was wondering if this is goods that can run well on older equipment.
I’m really impressed by Ubuntu, it looks good, and seems to have a promising future. I might even try this distribution, after a long time of being Linux-free
.
Only, that name… Really, that’s not a funny
.
I’ve already ordered a couple of CDs, so I’ll try it when I get mine in the mail. I’m a little wary of getting rid of Gentoo, but this looks pretty sweet. I’ll have to think about it long and hard.
I’m writing this from Ubuntu, just finished the installation a moment ago. The initial impressions are good, however there are some glitches here and there (to be expected). Random thoughts:
1) In the installer the language is coupled with the keyboard layout. There is no possibility to select English as the language and still get a correct regional key-layout. I don’t think it’s an unusual case at all.
2) The installation is slow. I mean easily the slowest I’ve ever experienced. After the first boot the package setup seems to go on forever. There’s also too much scary console output at all stages, if something serious happens you’re not likely to catch is among the completely uninteresting output that makes up 99% of the messages. Also after the first boot you get an explosion of error messages when it apparently tries to bruteforce loading of drivers to see what works and what doesn’t.
3) I’ve got an X cursor stuck in the middle of the screen after logging in, it’s one of the old core pointers. The new cursors are very slick.
4) Finally an installer that doesn’t ask stupid questions that can easily be derived from the system itself. Everything from the network card to optimal resolution for my laptop’s screen was detected without question, my windows partition was detected and added to grub. Plus points for not mentioning lilo at any stage.
5) The firefox icon that is so prominently displayed is hideous, it really sticks out. Jimmac did a very nice one recently, use that one instead or the default GNOME lightblue globe.
6) I’ve got an wireless monitor in my panel by default, but there’s no wireless card in the machine.
If moving from one Ubuntu release to the next proves to be painless I can easily see this distro getting quite a following.
ok, so it has a few glitches. I bet they’ll fix them soon enough ^_^
1. Does it have udev/hal/gvm ?
2. Can I use marillat’s repository for multimedia stuff?
1. Yes, it has a fully functional Project Utopia stack, with some extra goodies for the investigative minded. 🙂
2. Sounds like people are having some success with it.
Really stupid name.
Seriously, it suggests way too strongly that it is somehow related to africa, but it’s not, which makes the name somehow pretentious and annoying. Names that sound coold but actually mean nothing are better: Gnome, Redhat, Mandrake, Microsoft, Coke… I think it is sort of like the debate priciple where you don’t ever ask a question that you might not like the answer to. A name like ubuntu is like a question inviting people to read something into the name, bad idea. especially for a frigging linux distro.
Neither have I seen a hardisk writer, or Floppy writer for that matter. Does it ever contain those?
gnome has nautilus-cd-burner. Just go to burn:/// (or in a nautilus window, Places->CD Creator) and you can drop files and write to CD. No idea if it handles audio CDs or isos. I could’t find how to do it in gnome 2.6, and I haven’t tried 2.8 yet.
Microsoft -> Microcomputer Software?
Mandrake -> French cartoon strip magician. Since Mandrake is a french distro, this would mean something to the french linux community (eg this distra is magic?!)
others-> no idea
So what is there to get excited about? the fact that they came out with the first distro with Gnome 2.8? One more Linux ditro to add to the stack doesn’t help out linux at all.
What would you say if I told you that our fearless leader was the First African in Space? There is most certainly an African connection. 🙂
* put in your blank, a window pops up, drag the files you want to burn to it, File->Write to CD, you can also create an iso at this stage easily
* in any Nautilus window: Places-> CD Creator, a window pops up, the rest is same as above
* right-click on .iso file -> Write to CD …
Writing to CD is such a routine task it should not need a dedicated App.
You finally jettison Libranet or is this for another machine?
So, please let me confirm: if the folks at ubuntu suddenly packed up and disappeared a few months down the road, could ubuntu users just smoothly switch to using standard Debian apt repositories (set to Sid)?
Reasonably smoothly, yes.
Writing to CD is such a routine task it should not need a dedicated App.
There’s a lot of things that people like to burn: Besides data, there’s music, (S)VCD videos, and DVD’s, for example, depending if it’s legal in your country to do so.
GNOME’s CD-Creator can’t burn ‘on the fly’, as far as I could see. I might be wrong, though. What about normalizing music, or checking VCD or SVCD specifications?
IMHO, there’s no such thing as a common tool for everybodys needs.
Really stupid name.
You must be a yankee from the USA, right..? Not everything like product names has to be made yankee friendly for it to work, you know. And there are lots of Linux users living in countries where US American is not spoken (besides: aren’t most yankees using MS Windows or Mac OS X anyway?).
Names that sound coold but actually mean nothing are better: Gnome, Redhat, Mandrake, Microsoft, Coke…
All those names do mean something. To most people “Ubuntu” must sound a relatively neutral name and that can be easily identified with a certain product therefore.
There are lots of Linux distributions that have a bit odd names, like Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, Yoper, Xandros, Linspire etc. An African name is no more stupid than those others are. I don’t know if Ubuntu is a cool name or not, but a name like that is sure no reason for a product to fail.
The install took just about an hour on my G3 500 iBook, and it looks great! I’ve just started playing with it, but it’s running very nicely. This poor little iBook can barely handle 10.3, so I spend most of my time with it in linux. I really like your choice of software, the default install is pretty much everything I use and nothing more. I was really looking forward to YellowDog 4.0 coming out for the general public, but I just may stick with this.
Very nice work guys.
Can we run it without gnome? Not trolling but I just like KDE better.
I don’t believe people are getting their pants up in a bunch because of a name. And to the person above if you don’t like Africans or the African connection, whatever that means, use a distro with an American connection, there are plenty of them or whatever connection or race you like.
Yep I’m sure coaster wasn’t ready in time so for now your going to be own your own regarding CD/DVD/SVCD burning etc. Even then Coaster is still very limited in what it can do. Too bad it looks like we will never see a Gnome equivlant to K3b. That app rocks. Man have I gone through like 50 half fininshed gtk burners…
And no, the extremely limited basically featureless cd burner that comes with Nautilus isn’t a substitute for a proper app. Nobody uses the crappy burner built into windows XP either.
Eroaster, is a GNOME app, just like k3b, for burning CDs. I must have mentioned this app a million times over here at osnews.
*sighs*
What are your plans ragarding your package selecetion? Do you intend to gradually let the repository grow(aka build as much packages as your package maintainers can handle) to give users more choice, or do you want to keep the repository relatively small in order to ensure top-notch quality?
No offense, but you look no better talking about US citizens then the guy who originally said he dis-liked the name… I mean just because he says “Really stupid name.” you instantly A) Ridicule the US, and B) assume he is from the US.. get a grip man.
Metic:
You must be a yankee from the USA, right..? Not everything like product names has to be made yankee friendly for it to work, you know. And there are lots of Linux users living in countries where US American is not spoken (besides: aren’t most yankees using MS Windows or Mac OS X anyway?).
Do you track sid on 6 month cycles or daily? e.g. when Debian’s mozilla-firefox goes from i.j.k to i.j.k+1 in between your releases, will ubuntu’s package be upgraded as well? Does this only apply to the major packages or everything?
uh, ahem, does anybody have any comment to make on this distro’s speed relative to others (and especially its suitability for pre pent3 computers?)?
I am using the AMD64 of Ubuntu version. It’s quicker than a standard Gentoo installation based off of GRP. I don’t know how they did it, my OS boots up in 7 seconds from the machine turning on right into Xwindows. Perhaps they specially compiled the packages for speed optimization? I am amazed in the quickness.
personally i like the name. But is it pronounced oo-bun-too, you-bun-too ,oo-boon-too, you-boon-too ?
i like that name, too.
people in english-speaking world should be aware that there is vast amount of languages around spoken by vast amount of people and not to complain about reality
i myself consider gthumb and k3b extremely useful programs with absolutely unpronouncable names, so i just avoid using their names and say “cd-burner” and “picture viewer” instead.
Who cares about screenshots? They all look the same.
It is most likely pronounced /oo/ /boon/ /too/. Most languages of Southern, Central and Eastern Africa have “pure vowels” (the best European approximation is the Italian pronunciation of a, e, i, o, u as in (fAther, pAId, bEAk, tOE, and mOOn) Though this /oo/ is more properly described as follows: try to whistle at the lowest possible note that you can produce; then keep your lips and tounge in that exact position; finally “voice” the sound… what results will be the closest that an American speaker of English with no linguistic background can get to the correct pronounciation.
Ubuntu and Gnome 2.8 look awesome by the way… nice work.
Okay, Liberals are Anti-American and Pro-Terrorist. Happy?
Seriously though, I think the name is fine and Ubuntu looks like a pretty good distro so far.
I have a friend who has been waiting patiently for the next version of Libranet to come along, but I think Ubuntu will handle his needs quite nicely.
To tell the truth, I’m not a big fan of the name myself. My original reaction to Ubuntu was to ignore it, because going by the name I thought it was one of those locale-specific distros that are so popular today. Western names, ironically, tend to seem much more geographically neutral, for the simple reason that Western products tend to be sold worldwide.
I don’t think the name will impact the distro much, but it’s certainly not a positive point…
I think the Name’s awesome. It’s the only reason I downloaded and installed this distro. (The ‘adult’ screenshot on the site didn’t hurt ;-D) It’s not like they’re calling it Black Panther Linux or Kill Whiteynix or MarxNix…
So far I like it, but there’s some kind of ACPI problem with the distro on my inspiron 4100. Every time it wakes, comes out of screensaver or I change from A/C to battery it locks up. It’s a dealbreaker right now, but I’m sure with a little tinkering I’ll get it fixed.
The name is fab, I am quite pleased coz I am African and a speaker of the language from which the name was derived. However the definition on the website is somewhat nisleading, “ubuntu” simply means “humanity” or “human nature”.
I am going to download this asap and try it. The screenshots look awesome.
Worked great. I had to install the nvidia driver, but it was pretty painless, Ubuntu has it in its regular sources. If you “apt-cache search nvidia”, you’ll see nvidia-glx (need it), and a modules package that contains the nvidia one. Installed both, tweaked XF86Config-4 to my liking and it was done.
As and XFCE4 + mplayer user though, how does one install codecs with gstreamer? I saw that there’s a folder for plugins, but is there a place to get those?
Amazing. First step towards Acutal Linux for the Desktop!
I installed Ubuntu this afternoon and like it so far. I do have a question about MythTV though. I have MythTV running on a server in another room and typically install the front end on my test machine to watch TV with.
How do I install it with Ubuntu? I have installed it on Debian sarge/sid, but with Ubuntu I don’t have some of the prerequisites. I have added the lines to sources.list for the MythTV software, but it is looking for software from SID. Just add the SID repository to my sources?
Have you tried adding the universe repository?
Settle down there boy, apparently the Ubuntu team is a who’s who of Gnome and Debian developers (as well as one from KDE and XFCE each, I believe), so give them a chance. Please remember that this is just their first pre-release, and they already have a very smooth, cohesive desktop experience going (apparently from what I’ve read, I’m still downloading… damned dialup). A lot of people, myself included, haven’t been able to find an adequate stable and light off the CD distribution. This may be it, with the added bonus of a package manager to leave RPM where it belongs: five years ago. Plus they’re filling the much needed void of PPC ports, and AMD64 too.
Besides, even if the distro completely lacks innovation, and never changes that fact, what’s the point in getting so angry about it? You’re only going to hurt yourself, so please just relax.
Oh, and please don’t pass off getting Gnome working smoothly as a walk in the park until you try it on Arch. It’s not my chosen DE, but I’ll give credit where it’s due.
—
Michael Salivar
I did the one thing I know I should not do, I installed this on the same drive my Windows partition sits on. It installed fine, I have no problems with the distro itself … it’s basic Gnome with a Debian base and nothing more … but I could not get the Grub it installed to boot my Windows partition (hd0,0). “Error loading operating system” was the only thing Windows could give me.
I brought out my trusty Linux rescue disk (based on Gentoo), removed the Ubuntu partitions and resized my Windows partition to span the entire drive with QTParted. I dd’ed out the first 512 on the drive and redid the partition table (easy when you have a single partition spanning the entire drive). Usually this works fine when I have a corrupt partition table or MBR, but unfortunately this time it did not. Same problem, “Error loading operating system”.
I come to find later that my BIOS is now incorrectly autodetecting my primary hard drive and using CHS instead of LBA. I manually set it to LBA, and Windows boots fine. Anyone have the slightest clue what is wrong? I get a few results with Google, but none that will tell me how to fix the problem. I never, ever, have had to manually set the access mode for my hard drive on this system.
I have installed Ubuntu last night on my work Laptop (Toshiba Latitude D600) – i always wanted a Debian based, up to date distro that uses Gnome as their main desktop (currently using Suse 9.1 at home – and i am not too impressed with it):
1. The installation was very easy – took me about half an hour or 45 minutes before i could boot into Gnome. However when it comes to the partitioning and setting up your harddrive, don’t choose ReiserFS, stick with ext3 – because the installation won’t work correctly and you probably won’t be able to start x (i think there is a similar issue with Userlinux)
2. acpi doesn’t seem to work on my laptop
3. i have WinXP installed on another partition – Ubuntu doesn’t seem to mount my Windows partitions (or at least automatically – haven’t had time to check it out yet)
4. sound for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my machine (yet)
5. Why did they use these ugly openoffice icons in the office menu – there are much nicer ones (like on the Ximian desktop)
These are just first impressions (i did not have too muich time last night to properly play with it, or try and resolv some of the issues) – all in all it looks like a very interresting project and i probably will switch to Ubuntu from Suse, once i had a closer look at it.
Gnome 2.8 is amazing and super fast. Can you believe my wireless card worked out of the box, it’s an atheros based card and Ubuntu (love the name BTW) has the madwifi drivers well integrated, all I had to do was add my encryption key to /etc/network/interfaces and it worked flawlessly. I forgot how great the debian packaging system is and Synaptic is a really attractive GTK2 app which makes managing debian packages a cinch. Also, Evolution 2 looks amazing so far. I like how this distro is stripped down to the bare essentials. Installation was a snap, all I had to do was tell it the partition scheme and not other questions asked. One thing which did go awry is that it didn’t correct my monitor timings correctly, so I had to edit them manually into the X config file. This distro really took me by surprise, I suggest everyone gives it a spin. I thought Fedora was good, but I’m ecstatic that all of my hardware was detected so flaswlessy with Ubuntu!
I do not see what is so very difficult about the name… The pronunciation should come naturally to anyone who has had any linguistic education besides that of english… Since this is in general a req. of most western educational systems, everyone should be able to pronounce it easily.
To the people using the term “yank/ee”… Some of us here in southern america take offense to being called a “yank/ee”; y’all expect us to know everything about your cuntries and cultures, yet you obviousely know very little about ours.
*sigh*
I suppose you also think all americans love Bush? or that John Kerry is very different? …the hilarity…
The console based install process is amazingly simple, but it will not install here. Just gets stuck at gettext_base and won’t go…
Was kinda looking forward to it…
Androo, you experienced the drive geometry problem, i think. See http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc2.shtml – this is for FC2 but actually applies to 2.6 kernel-based distros (unless its been fixed yet – I dunno), you could have simply used sfdisk to re-write the correct geometry values, and Windows would have booted fine.
well, yadl!
(yet another desktop linux).
nothing against ubuntu (i share the opinion of some that the name signals a local african distribution), but because one meanwhile drownes in yadls (and yae[nterprise]ls), it might be a very good idea that the various debian-based yadls and yaels working closely together (unite) to avoid redundancy and fragmentation, and so increasing visibility, userfriendlyness and impact!
choice certainly is good, but because all those mentioned distros contain more or less the same stuff anyway, it would be not much effort to sync tightly.
i might give it or userlinux a spin, though!
51 shots of…. MENUS!!!
Very interesting, yes… very interesting.
Thank you for that link. After a bit of playing around with sfdisk (the command listed on that page didn’t work initially) I was able to fix the problem entirely. Sfdisk + fixboot on the Windows Recovery Console got me going again.
So I am to assume that I experienced a bug in the 2.6 kernel?
Can any give a real quick rundown of the nvidia driver installation for Ubuntu? Thanks.
By default it installs the standard open source drivers. It comes with the binary drivers in the linux-restricted-modules (or something like that) package. I didn’t know that until I had my own driver package compiled, so I don’t know how well it works. I think you still need to change the driver to “nvidia” in the XF86Config and put the nvidia module into /etc/modules. They have stated that they want to make this process a lot easier in the future, but the open source driver will always be the default and the binary driver comes without support of course.
I think that’s a sane approach to the problem and I hope that soon using the binary driver will become as easy as to switch a toggle in the GUI.
Yeah, seriously. Why is this different that the other Linux distributions? I’d really like to know and IMO this should be included on the website. Yes, i read the FAQ, it didn’t tell me a lot.
Right now, i know the following:
1) GNOME 2.8 included already right after it was included. That’s very fast, but what does it indicate? I’m really not able to answer that question.
2) No root account by default, sudo-only. No passwd set, but it is locked. That’s pretty unique, but what does […] etc, same as with GNOME 2.8 included.
I really like both of these aspects but i’m not able to tell me besides that, or conclude anything based on that. Which i don’t like
Nice install! No promblems att all…(overclocked AMD 2100@2700)…With a Epox RDA+..Nforce2
just wiped out my “sarge” install…!
Like the Gnome 2.8 too!
Awesome!!
Keep up the good work!
no problem install on an iBook 500 MHz… nice work…
Pretty much a flawless install here. All I did was specify my wireless WEP key at the install, choose to completely wipe out my linux partition and away it went. Install took about 20 minutes or so and I was up and running very quickly.
WiFi and touchpad work flawlessly as well. My only problem was the screen kept on flickering and it had an ‘X’ cursor stuck in the middle of the screen but I played with the XF86config utilities and it was fixed.
All in all, great job to all of you at the Ubuntu team.
So I am to assume that I experienced a bug in the 2.6 kernel?
No. The bug is in how XP handles partition information. It’s horribly outdated. Although, I have XP here and didn’t experience the issue you did when installing Ubuntu.
My installation actually did the exact same thing. Giving me Error Loading operating system after i installed Ubuntu. Fortunately I didn’t have anything important on the system so I just forced it to LBA.. cleared my partition table and MBR and then reinstalling both Windows and ubuntu worked great!
Nate
Ubuntu has a significant performance, it runs faster than any other distro even with stage1 gentoo 2004.2, the programs are all GNOME and tightly integrated. I love it by first use, now I drop FC for Ubuntu.
Does sleep and suspend work out of the box?