Jackalope gets jaunty with Ubuntu nip and tuck Ubuntu 9.04 - officially launched today and due to be ready for download on Thursday - is a worthwhile upgrade for Ubuntu fans. Ubuntu steward Canonical has been working hard to improve the look and feel of Ubuntu and the Jaunty Jackalope edition brings quite a few refreshing touches to the old exterior. The default theme is …
"There aren't many application updates for this round of Ubuntu. The newer Basero CD/DVD authoring tool sees an update, but stalwarts such as OpenOffice, GIMP 2.6, and Firefox have seen no major updates since Ubuntu 8.10."
Point of order: according to Canonical punts Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/20/ubuntu_9_04_released/),
"The Linux stack also includes support for the OpenOffice 3.0 office application suite, which didn't make it into the Ubuntu 8.10 release last fall."
And before any of you smartasses say "that says SUPPORTED, not INCLUDED", this from the horses mouth:
"Ubuntu 9.04 features OpenOffice.org 3.0. This gives users a complete office suite that is entirely compatible with Microsoft Office. This free office software provides an immediate saving of at least $200 for users who need to create presentations, write documents or manage spreadsheets at work or at home."
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-9.04-desktop
I've waxed lyrical about the notification system in the past, so this will not come as a surprise to people who know me.
The "new" notification system is not really new. It's slick, I'll give them that, but it's not new. The spec was originally published years ago over at http://www.galago-project.org/. Applications have been using it for *years*. All Ubuntu have done is "implement" the standard. They've done a good job, thanks to the excellent Macslow, but critically, they decided to drop one of the main useful features of this specification - application callbacks.
Allowing the user to click on a link or button on an alert is an excellent, standard and consistent way to allow apps to be functional yet unobtrusive. It's also a cross desktop approach, allowing a KDE or GNOME implementation of the spec means that it's your DE that handles the look and feel of the notifications, not the app. The advice from Ubuntu about getting input? Do it yourself, cook up your own dialog, do something different. If this isn't a route to desktop inconsistency I don't know what is. So to summarise, Ubuntu have not innovated (it's an old spec) and they've gone out of there way to cripple a very useful aspect of that spec.
So, thumbs up for the look and feel, massive thumbs down for helping to being the linux desktop forward.
Just when I was about to replace Ubuntu 8.10 with Debian 5.0 and gain the respect of my peers, as well. Now I'll have to give this a spin first just to see if I like it, and end up sticking with it because of Ubuntu's irritating tendency to just work, despite my epic laziness and unwillingness to tinker with anything for more than five seconds to get it to behave.
A few different colours in the desktop and newer versions of the existing applications.
All this version (and I've run the beta in a VM - until I decided it wasn't worth the disk space and deleted it). gives is a few small, and largely unnoticable, changes to the existing set of tools.
If you are primarily interested in GETTING STUFF DONE, rather than cooing about having various themes and different coloured boxes, then this release (just like most of the ones before it) offers no incentive to upgrade.
I found that this release did not give me the ability to actually achieve anything that I couldn't do with earlier releases. Nor did it make anything else significantly easier, faster or better.
It's nice, if you're planning to install Ubuntu for the first time, but I feel that the time spent upgrading to v9 from v8 would be largely wasted.
It hasn't imported some of my more obscure Intrepid settings properly, but other than that Jaunty's been quite nice since I installed it. It's become more and more stable as we've gotten closer to release (obviously), and now it doesn't really give me any hassle. But then that's what I like about Ubuntu and Linux in general - they do as they're bloody told, rather than trying to tell you how things are going to happen.
Oh, and ext4 is luvverly. Zoooooom.
Ubuntu's slow-n-steady upgrades would have been a good strategy with its KDE sibling, Kubuntu.
Admittedly, the feature-shock of of Kubuntu 8.10 is entirely due to KDE4. The layout and UI and plasma/plasmoid mindset is as radically different as jumping from Win95 to Vista.
There was much I really liked in KDE4, and I wanted it to work. Even when I felt equally comfortable in KDE4 as I had in KDE3, the rapid changes made it too unstable for reliable use. Things that took far too long to research and fix, would often refuse to stay fixed. (The taskbar was especially prone to breaking.)
The deal-breaker for me was PIM synchronization. Even ignoring my symbian cell phone, I fought months of lost data, corrupted calendars, and munged contacts on my Palm devices before finally giving up. Evolution doesn't do it for me. Mozilla is close, but Kontact is my must-have, killer app.
I realize this is due to opensync being hopelessly behind schedule. HOWEVER, the whole purpose for a repackaged Debian (or Redhat or whatever) is to conveniently include all the stability of the parent OS with newer, popular software that might not make it into the stable releases or repositories. Convenient installation of proprietary drivers and software, especially.
I'm glad Canonical succeeded in this aim with Gnome and Ubuntu. They've failed miserably with KDE/Kubuntu--at least as far as PIM and synchronization.
I think Mepis has a good strategy while KDE4 is still suffering labour pains. They've stuck with KDE3. Another strategy might be a bridge or meta-package allowing the PIM and sync software from KDE3 to work in KDE4 until opensync catchings up and the whole mess with Akonadi/opensync/PIM can be unsnarled. (Libranet used this route constantly and successfully in its day.)
For now, I'll use Debian 5 (Lenny,) dual booting to Mepis and mourn my old friend Kubuntu...at least until KDE4 stops being too flaky to trust.
"Ubuntu 9.04 features OpenOffice.org 3.0. This gives users a complete office suite that is entirely compatible with Microsoft Office."
In the same way that the iPhone offers access to "the entire Internet" ? Sorry, I use OO.o at home and think it's double-plus good, but saying it's "entirely compatible" with MS Office is more than slightly misleading. Such statements could come back to bite them on the face.
Sad, but true. I have been using 8.10 in a VirtualBox image for my studies (so I didn't screw up the main machine and didn't need to buy another Doze license) and, must admit, have grown to like it. It has got to the stage where I get irritated that Windows does not behave like Gnome (at the start it was the other way round).
There's quite a lot I still need to learn (media streaming being one, ssh being another, there's plenty more) and much that (to me) is rough around the edges. e.g. Nautilus seems half-baked, accessing the network from file-open dialogs seems impossible (yeah, I could mount the share but there are times I don't want to and I happen to know exactly where the file is). Although Gnome does knock KDE into a cocked hat (still have to check out 4.2 though).
Ubuntu vs Mac, can't comment; never used a Mac of any kind (I'm not that rich).
Ubuntu vs Windows, no contest; so far the only thing where Windows beats Ubuntu is "Media Center" (I don't play games on the PC). That works, and works pretty well (unusually for MS). I know there is MythTV, I have not had the chance to look at it) but from what I have read it seems to be a bit behind the ease of use of MC; or perhaps I am doing it down.
For everything else I have used it for Ubuntu beats Windows into a bloody pulp. I would not have said that about 3 months ago, I would have said "Gah! Bloody terminal! A pox upon thee!" or "X, why dost thou vex me so?" and that was mostly because I had chucked myself in the deep end without a life-jacket (or any swimming trunks). Now I have stopped arsing around and decided to get on with some work (well, study) I hardly go near the terminal (no more than I need the command prompt in Doze at any rate) and it all just works. Very, very well.
I am looking forward to finishing this sodding studying and actually getting some time to go back and learn about Linux proper, rather than rely on the half-assed bootstrap I needed to do to myself to get going.
The real test for Linux (not sure which distro) in my world will come when the g/f tries to switch. Her Windows laptop is turning into a complete dog and I have suggested giving Linux a bash before shelling out for a new one. If she takes to it, Linux will truly be ready for the real-world in my book.
TO those who dis Linux, it takes time. I remember moving from WIndows 3.11, I *hated* the new interface. I *hated* everything about the new Windows in general. It took me a good 3 months or so to learn to accept it (and that was with daily use). Would someone convert to Linux in a day? No, no would anyone convert to any new GUI in a day. It takes a bit of time to slot into the different way of doing things. Then the only question is:
Is the way I am doing things now, better (for me,in my situation) than the way I did them before?
I had 8.0.4. Was nice. One day, I let it do some updates. White screen of death. Blew it away and downloaded 8.10. Could not install, doesn't work with Toshiba A200 ATI video card in 8.10 so installer never loaded.
Not sure I want an OS that can commit suicide so easily.
The notebook remix on my Eee 701 that is. But I don't know that the screen size of the thing will make it a more usable environment than my 'somewhat' tweaked up xandros (yep I still use it, main reason for not changing is screen real estate).
Still have this reservation of shelving debian on my desktop.
As one other has commented, it's awfully excrementy brown.... Hmmm.... You think....? Na....
"a more stable and robust Linux distro"
Unless you are using KDE on an Intel graphics chipset, where according to the bug reports (filed by the beta testers) and beta release notes (not all of which were fixed or carried in to the release release notes), your choices are very very slow performance or the experimental UXA system which crashes. FAIL.
At last time to upgrade. I've been running Ubuntu 8.10 dual booting with Vista on my laptop now since I got it (at Christmas) and as much as I love Ubuntu I have found a few teething problems with it although it's mainly been a case of I've been either too busy or lazy to do anything about it. I have Intrepid running on my kids desktop and it just works (and they'll be getting a MythTV upgrade in the next few days when the digital TV switchover is complete in my area).
I'm looking forward to the new notification system too, I like the idea that the messages just pop up long enough to notify me of something, I just hope that it's possible to read the messages after they have popped up in case I miss anything.
With regards to the brown theme, I have found it to be getting a bit boring now for my liking although heading down to gnome-look.org you can get a nice selection of alternative desktops and colour schemes (although I've personally been using the blue theme that's built in).
So I guess this weekend I'll be doing a complete reinstall and sticking Jaunty on my laptop alongside Windows 7 (I did try this but I found it to be too unstable, I'm going to give it another chance though as I did quite like it).
I probably won't touch Kubuntu though, as much as I liked the look of it I couldn't get on with it in 8.10.
Rob
I've tried every iteration of Ubuntu since the first release and each time, I've hoped and prayed they would *finally* get it all right.
I've either run it as a primary OS for a week or so, or as a secondary OS for testing.
Each time, I've returned to Windows XP out of sheer frustration.
A lot of it has to do with application support and slickness.
There's simply no decent replacements for apps such as iTunes or Photoshop. Game support is hit and miss - use wine, a virtual machine or dual boot with windows XP.
As far as using it as a virtual machine for my server requirements, I'm using Debian testing for that and there's no way I would switch.
I really have tried to like Ubuntu as an alternative, but time after time, I end up running that old chestnut, Windows XP - almost 8 years old.
The sad thing is, even though it was released over 7 years ago, it's *still* better than Ubuntu...
Besides, my better half calls it "Umbongo" which kinda says it all...
/me grabs flameproof suit
Re USB broadband dongles - I don't know about T-Mobile, but my 3 dongle has been supported since 8.10, just plug it in and tell it what provider. Very slick.
Upgraded earlier, so far I'm liking it . A number of niggly little bugs fixed, I really like the new notifications (giving Macslow a job was a great move by Canonical) and the upgrade was completely painless.
Your Office 2003 macros won't work in MS Office 2007 either without significant fiddling, so what's your point?
Not to mention the whole MS Office 2003 > OpenOffice 3.0 jump is easier than MS Office 2003 to 2007.
- On the other hand, Impress is not very good. This may reflect engineer's general dislike of presentation software.
I had to add the xorg-crack-pushers (love the name) ppa on my laptop to get decent performance out of my onboard intel video, but as it was totally fscked on intrepid I'm really happy.
To the excited anon, give xbmc (xbmc.org) a try, in fact, everyone reading this, on windows, mac or linux should try it.
All in all, I have been reasonably happy with Ubuntu over here. I started out with Gutsy Gibbon, and though Gutsy had some niggles with the various machines I tried it on, it was good enough for me when I was surfing Net and checking tuneage. I have had the best luck with the GNOME variant, with XFCE usually running a close second, while Kubuntu has seemed half-baked in comparison. For KDE, whether it's 3 or 4, it was usually Mandriva or PCLinuxOS which had the better KDE implementation for my needs. As for Intrepid, it has proven to me to be capable enough to use every day for almost all my needs, including watching archived videos and automagic configuration of several 802.11B/G cards I have. Even the old Broadcom B/G in the lappy gets its bits properly set with a few clicks now at setup time. So far, it appears that each new release of Ubuntu offers more improvements than regressions, so I look forward to April and October when the new stuff lands. This Thursday will definitely be seeing me snagging torrents of Ubuntu and Kubuntu (probably Xubuntu as well). I know GNOME will work out fine, and we'll see if Kubuntu gets it right this time with 4.2 under the hood.
Paris, because she can show us how to work our Jaunty Jackalopes, alright...
Just my two-penneth - I've been running the Kubuntu flavour on my Aspire 1 for a couple of days now and I have to say it is working pretty well; everything worked straight out of the box, except the font scaling needed a good tweak, but then these netbooks do have such silly little screens... The only thing that's (potentially) going to be a problem is the wlan card conked out on one occasion and needed a really cold boot to come back; hope this does not become a regular occurrence!
... Oh, and with such a small screen, it is a little bit easy to miss the notification window if it pops up at an inopportune moment - and it seems counter-intuitive to not be able to click on it to go to the app / some more detail (pointed out by Colin Guthrie above).
I mean who use the default theme anyway? I upgraded to jaunty for the beta release and thing went smoothly with just a few quirk it was in beta after all. I started using Linux about two years ago and aside from a few problem that needed fixing and usually found solution for anything in five second with just a google search or two. I am really impressed so far.
If you have an older jaunty .iso and just what the changes this tip from a friend has proved helpful....
you can rsync the .iso with rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ and then you'd only need to download <50MB of changes on the actual day
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RsyncCdImage
Nice :)
I'll flip a coin...
Ubuntu lives on the Maxtor.....
Heads says I put 8.10 back on the Maxtor
Tails says I rip the Maxtor out of the box... Bounce it down the garden path and burn the fuck out of it..
Bugger... It was Heads. That was rather fortunate..... I should have spent some time working out how to do shite with the MBR so XP won't get fucked because I don't need it.
I'll do that again.
Wait one....
I think my original complaint, which did not get published due to un-ladylike language was the upgrade arbitrarily decided to dump parts of the stuff I had installed outside of Canonical's concept of what should be there.
Sure.... I just clicked OK OK OK [and watched it do it knowing things were not going to be good afterwards] but it arbitrarily dumped 'parts' of the stuff leaving other bits of it smeared all over my hard one. Typical male stuff.
Now I have to work out how to tidy things up after the spotty geeks have descended. I, almost, don't mind because I just lurve re-installing the whole banana from scratch.
Still.... my experience was... that took about as much as XP SP3 in terms of download size [or I might have done better if I dowloaded a Live ISO and started from scratch] and then prattled about for just short of 2 hours and all I got was a 'prettier' login screen and trashed software. Mumble me very nicely.
Oh.... and Firefox is still on 3.0.8 with the 'update' option greyed out. Hmm I suppose I'll have to log in as 'real' root to see if I get the option to protect myself from those new nasties.
Still, I suppose I managed to fiddle Grub onto hd1 and put the MBR on hd0 back to XP... switch the boot sequence in the bios... and that seems 'nicer'.
Don't get me wrong. I like Ubuntu and the other stuff it comes with. I just don't need it leaving its discarded socks on the floor, its dirty Y-fronts under the mattress, a demonstration of an inability to cook without generating a kitchen full of grease and my baking trays being used for sump oil.
Deep Breath
Ahhhhhhhh that's better...
Or maybe not. It appears to be downloading another bunch of scribble. We shall see.
Due to my 'luser' status I appear to be unable to recover things so I'll scrub the lot and start again.
I'll assume my home folder 'backup' will not work and I'll have to fix other stuff so I can be happy. Time to write stuff down on paper and e-mail the rest of my rubbish to XP so I can grab it back later.
I'd write it to CD but, last time I checked.... that was broken.
There's sad.....
I'm sure there is an easier way but then I'd probably have to get a boyfriend and offer rooting access to my lingerie.
Huh.. before I whizzle my CD's I'll just say, 'unfairly', that this one either smacked of my stupidity, someone else's stupidity or a Canonical grab for a lock in.
Blah
Later
Bye
Camilla... thanks for the entertainment.
My biggest complaint about Jaunty is with the implementation of Pidgin. I'm not sure if it's just because of the new notification system or what. I like the notifications... and I heartily agree that you should be able to click on the notifications or links within the notifications to open the associated application, but Pidgin's icon is changed to a mail folder that looks like an email client. Instead of being able to double click on the icon and reopen my contact list, it does nothing with a double click. A single click brings up a box that shows the pidgin messenger, then I can click that link to reopen my contact list. The icon also no longer shows my status.
Jaunty also didn't offer to import any of my settings from 8.10 or Windows XP, though 8.10 always offered to import settings when I installed it.
I was amazed at how fast Jaunty boots.. about 12 seconds on my laptop, and I think the new login screen is AWESOME! But what the heck is up with the boring default wallpaper and theme? Where's the new artwork that's been worked on for the past 3-4 releases? I like the new-wave theme, and that would been a better choice for a default theme. They need the rest of the artwork to match the login screen and it'll be great. The usplash theme kinda sucks to me and wasn't worth their effort to update, though I guess in 9.10 when it swiches to plymouth we might see something neat.
I can understand the release having 2.6.28 kernel, but I think they should release 2.6.29 to the repositories instead of just updates to the 28 release.
Openoffice was a decent upgrade, that was highly annoying also that they didn't offer a direct upgrade from 2.4 on Intrepid. I'm glad to see the latest versions of gimp, pidgin, and vlc (available at least) Speaking of VLC... why the heck isn't it a default application?
To do a dist-upgrade from 8.10 it wanted me to download 800mb of updates. I had already downloaded the iso though, so I did a fresh install, then to download the applications I needed, skype, java, flash, VLC, k3b, codecs, etc... was about 512mb. I mean yeah, 700+512 > 800mb to update... but I really don't understand why if I already have firefox 3.0.9, openoffice 3.01, the latest flash and java, and codecs... why my dist-upgrade was 800 freaking MBs?
Anyway... overall, yes I like Jaunty. Could it have been better... probably. The whole Intel video driver fiasco... wow. I'm not sure what to do with my netbook now, install jaunty and go through the hassle of tweaking the crap out of the xorg.conf and loading various intel drivers, or stick with 8.10 for now. I want to get it all set up and nice grub splash screen and themes for my wife. (pink everything basically, including the wind)
Well, I thought I was done, but one more thing. Grub splash screens. Why doesn't Ubuntu include, 1 a grub splash screen at all, 2, a nice looking Ubuntu logo'd splash screen. By default the menu is hidden, but I would like a menu. Multiple OSes usually, but even if it's just for selecting multiple kernels. Or the memtest.
Also, what about offering an upgrade install. Like redhat/fedora always had (has still?) where you boot from the cd, start installing, and it detects a previous install and asks if you want to upgrade it. Installs over the top of the old one, updating the applications and keeping either your old config, or at least making a backup copy of it.
Ok... rant finished.
You know, Ubuntu is a great operating system and a vast improvement over Vista, but the quality of testing by the development team leaves a lot to be desired - I couldn't possibly advocate using it for any serious purpose. Why? Every single time they post an update to the sound system, they screw it up! Their new 9.04 release has totally obliterated sound on my laptop, and from the bug tracker quite a few other people are having the same problem. Yet none of the developers are responding to the bug trackers - and many of the problems seem to be reintroduction of previous bugs which suggests incredibly poor coding discipline.
Sure, it's free - and linux is cut a lot of slack for that on a regular basis - but if they want to be taken seriously they just have to be better at doing the job properly. They're trying to set themselves up as a serious alternative to a Windows desktop, but can you imagine the fallout if a Windows update wiped out users sound systems because they tried to switch to an architecture that just didn't work, where they'd ignored previous bug reports that remain open to this day on their bug database, and then didn't bother replying to any user issues for weeks after release?
My new Dell Mini 9 LOVE the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). Even with the stock 512MB RAM (yes, I upgraded it), UNR took only about 240MB at boot time with NO swap usage. Performance is snappy, even with the relatively slow SSD. CPU utilization at idle is minimal, allowing for about 5 hours of "real" usability out of the battery. I love it!
i'm using ubuntu as my primary desktop, it's got everything i need and more. no problems with the use, updating and modification of this system. very stable, easy and fun to use. not a single problem, right down to wireless and multimedia support, i gotta this more than "just works", it owns. I switch to windows xp to play games when i have to, running a weak intel graphics chipset, but that's the game developers fault, there alligence with properitory software, i.e. directx and windows api, is forcing me to dual boot for games. oh well big whoop. i'm happy with everything, lxde makes a nice desktop replacement, removed all of gnome and using gtk2 apps where-ever possible, wicd for wireless, instant gratification right there.
like i said, i'll only use windows for games now, because that's all it's really good for anymore. about time to rest of you woke up!!!
-kmonk
io_uring is getting more capable, and PREEMPT_RT is going mainstream The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
