Ok, I've just tried my 12.04 / Unity laptop with my 22" monitor.
The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity launcher to the right hand side of my main screen, the 22" display, so that it doesn't get in the way of scrolling to the laptop's screen.
Yes. I am generally supportive of Unity but this is one thing I just can't understand. I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor, but the left-hand side doesn't even make sense (browser back button is on the left, window close button is on the left - any time I try to use either of them I accidentally trigger the launcher). The best solution I found was to use ccsm and change the hotkey to anything other than "left screen edge" or something similar.
The launcher then auto-hides permanently, but you can still cause it to appear with the windows key. Disappointing, really - there's no clever artistic or design reason to disallow a right-hand dock. It just seems like a case of hubris and ignorance.
> I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor
Depends. I have set my OSX dock to autohide at the bottom, and I'm glad I don't have to move across to reach it. Flick down, boom, Dock. It works even better than it sounds since it works along the edge, not solely where the dock is. Even with multiple monitors, my dock is at most one screen-wide away (even in a triple head setup), while a left-bound dock is two (even three) screenful away.
Also, I seem to unconsciously end up with the pointer in a vertically centered zone. Horizontally it comparatively could stay in any place, left, center or right. Statistically that might be the case too since going up for a (application or status icon) menu will later have me bring the pointer down since I click on a menu entry.
What's more it seems more natural and producing less strain for my eyes to peek up or down than to the far left. Indeed when I want for something to 'disappear' (like the pointer when typing) I move it sideways, never up or down.
Hence since I'm at most a screen width and half a screen height away form the dock, 'flick, boom, Dock' works only at the bottom.
While all of this may apply only to me (and I used a left-bound dock for a while myself, but ended up reverting back to the bottom edge) I understand that some may have other habits and prefer a left-, or right-bound dock. This is why both Gnome 3 and Unity drive me insane, because even if I had a lengthy experiment with a side dock it just doesn't make sense to me, and this is really infuriating to not let people have their way in this case.
(besides, vaguely related to the subject and multi head setups notwithstanding, I find it infuriating in Gnome 3 that the left edge does not reveal the dock and the right edge the workspace switcher. the whole thing just begs for it)
I used to feel the same way, since finding in c. 2006 that using an ATI card with Linux was pretty much impossible. However, this all changed when I built a new machine last year, and wanted 3 monitors. Two monitors worked great with Nvidia; 3 was impossible. I've found that, although still a little buggy, 3 monitors w/ Ubuntu, ATI/AMD graphics card and "EyeFinity" works great (on KDE at least):
http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Precise_Installation...
Note that you must use a single graphics card for this, which therefore must support 3 monitors. And in response to the grandparent -- I had the same issues with the order of monitors. Luckily they were all identical, so I just swapped the plugs.
If you use two different cards and some playing around with X.org you can get the nVidia drivers to play nice with 3 monitors.
Granted, it might be the most difficult configuration I've ever tried to figure out on *nix and I'm not trying to shoot you down, but for anyone reading your comment it's not actually "impossible".
Ok, here's a simple workaround for now. It doesn't let you put the launcher on the right, but it lets you keep the launcher only on one window (the laptop in your case).
Go to System Settings > Displays. The "Launcher placement" is set to "All displays" by default. Change it to "Laptop" (or whatever screen's on the left).
Gnome did no such thing. Unity is developed entirely by Canonical, they own full copyright on it and they employ all the developers for it. They can add any options they want, and they can omit any options they want. Gnome doesn't even factor into this.
Yeah, it's probably a choice. Both in Gnome and in Unity. Let's not confuse users by too many options and make our phone support as efficient as possible. Or something like that.
I might not like that but there are valid reasons to have dumbed down options. And if I'm not mistaken you can get some configurability out of 3rd party tools.
People have tried to package Unity for other distributions, but those efforts have failed. One of the main problems was the patches that Canonical applies to GNOME libraries (to make Unity work) and to applications (to make them integrate with Unity). If someone wanted to fork Unity they'd have to find a way to handle this to get it fully working on any distribution besides Ubuntu.
Be happy that you can get that far. My Dell Vostro V13 crashes as soon as I uncheck the "mirror displays" checkbox. Some light research pointed me to a known bug for this which didn't make it into this release.
question: why did you go with the Vostro? Dell seems to be intent on gutting their ubuntu product line. I can't get Ubuntu with an i5 or i7 processor, a solid state drive, or pretty much anything one might actually want.
I ran into this when Unity first debuted. That's when I knew it wasn't ready for prime time.
It's sad that this is still a limitation, but not entirely surprising. Canonical seemed to be intent on pushing this to everyone regardless. And now they don't even seem to be supporting the traditional Gnome desktop (whether 2.X or 3.X).
Lenovo X220. Standard Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity. Laptop display configured for left, 22" configured for right. Because I have launcher configured for auto-hide, every time that I scroll across to the left to reach the laptop display, the launcher gets in the way, hence I want it on the right.
I've read some of the other comments below and I've decided to try gnome-classic instead. It's a pity, because I really wanted to fall back in love with Ubuntu. I can't believe they didn't make it configurable to switch which side a bloody launcher is on. Sure, have your defaults, but make them configurable.
I'm curious: how long have you been running Ubuntu on your X220? And how stable has it been?
I was using Ubuntu on an X220 as my development machine for a while, with Ubuntu 11.04. It was extremely unstable -- the machine would freeze frequently when unplugging the DisplayPort cable, or even right in the middle of working. That along with a host of small bugs and annoyances (invisible desktop space on the smaller display in dual-display mode -- a longstanding issue in X apparently) eventually drove me back to using a Mac.
Until a few days ago I was running Fedora 16 (KDE) on the X220 and it ran perfectly. Ubuntu 11.04 was why I moved to Fedora in the first place.
On the X220, 12.04 has run perfectly. On the X120e however, which also ran Fedora 16 (KDE) previously, I have to admit that 12.04 was sluggish. I haven't narrowed down the problem - but I feel it might have something to do with graphics performance -- which feels strange, since I always historically associated KDE with sluggish performance due to graphics, not Gnome.
I had some problems with the trackpad in 11.10 (I use the nub, mostly).
12.04 has been nothing but rock solid the entire way. Everything including the above that you said is a problem. Sorry that I can't commiserate, but basically, the X220 + 12.04 are the near perfect setup I've wished for quite some time*
*only thing I would like is a higher resolution screen on the X220.
I don't always down vote, but when I do I prefer to leave a comment.
I've probably down voted someone less than 20 times on HN, but when I do I like to leave a comment as to why. Its been the case where I've been down voted and wondered why.
His comment isn't a troll comment and looking at his past comments he seems to be reasonable, intelligent, and otherwise a productive member of HN. I wanted him to know why I downvoted him, and he can consider changing the post to offer more insight in which case he would attract more upvotes and would generally make HN a better place.
What makes my comment more productive is that I articulated why I down voted which is that it lacked any insight into the process and didn't contribute to the conversation.
I don't think he should feel obligated to deliver. But, I think comments should generally add to the conversation. If they don't, I tend to down vote them.
A post about software being released happens. I made a (small) contribution to that software and mention it. It's subjective as to whether or not I added to the conversation but it's certainly relevant. You've been slightly patronising a couple of times in the thread and, ironically, you've only succeeded in starting meta-conversation.
I agree the meta conversation is of a particularly low value, and it wasn't my intention. Unfortunately, it's towards the top too!
I went back and looked for were I was slightly patronizing and the only thing I could find was this line: "So, you had two of your photos chosen for this release or no? Is that rare?" Which I can see how that could be more than slightly patronizing if it was read in a way that I hadn't intended it to be.
What I was trying to say is that for a project as big as Ubuntu, having two photos chosen seems to be a big deal. I didn't realize this when I originally down voted you, and I just wanted clarity.
In any case it was never my intention to be patronizing, so I'm sorry for coming across that way.
Just so you don't feel like the whole world is against you (I have no idea if / how many downvotes you may be getting) -- just wanted to chime in that I approve of your behavior completely, as well as the reasons for which you choose to downvote.
Thank you for trying to keep up the quality of conversation here.
This isn't necessarily directed at you (I make the same complaint to System76), but I really wish I could go on Amazon and buy a Linux laptop. I like the security of Amazon payments, the customer service, and I am a Prime subscriber so I like the free two-day shipping.
I totally understand. It's frickin' 2012 and I can't stand the fact that we can't do that. We want to sell via as many channels as possible, including Amazon.
This is a tiny first step towards making a new computer company. Just need some love from hackers.
It seems to me that Amazon is taking a cut in order offer things such as security, customer service, 2 day shipping, etc. If I want to pay a extra for these services for a laptop from your company, why wouldn't you let me?
Can you offer the lower price point on your and a higher price on amazon?
Seems counterproductive (or at least bad marketing) to me to force the user to register before he can see your products. I suppose most people will simply leave your page without registering because they can't see what you offer.
You're right. We're working on putting up the product details, but don't want to mislead people before we know for sure what we are able to offer. I only mentioned it here because I know people here would be really interested (and the signups so far suggest they are).
I'm curious, what does selling Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed involved? Does Lenovo sell in bulk as an OEM, OS-less? Other companies have sold Thinkpads running Linux for years (Emperor Linux, IIRC) but at a large markup, such that I assume they're buying in tiny quantities, maybe even retail one at a time, unboxing/installing Linux/boxing/reshipping (pure conjecture, I've never looked into it). Also, any nonfree drivers required?
Thanks for signing up. We're part of the Lenovo Partner network and are making a deal with them to buy in bulk. We don't want to sell overpriced machines like Emperor Linux (an equal spec T420 costs $1430 on Emperor vs $859 on Lenovo!).
Just signed up. Would love to hear more about your business. It's really a pain to find a laptop that would not suck under Linux for any of the important dimensions (wifi, battery life, external monitor support, working fn keys and etc).
I know of System76 and etc, but their hardware doesn't inspire me much (spoiled by Apple).
We want to build the best computers for programmers at the best price with the OS most programmers run on their servers and dev machines anyway.
All the issues you mention and others relating to graphics continue to exist because there is no single organisation focusing on the full hardware+software stack. [1] It is really hard to get everything working on such a huge range of hardware with software that keeps moving so fast.
So we are starting by focusing on just getting everything working on some of the best existing machines - Thinkpads.
If you have any ideas or requests for your ideal setup, please share them here or email me at hrishi@giniji.com.
[1] I don't want to take any credit away from System76 and other similar companies. They've done a great job, but they don't seem to be proactive in pushing things forward.
> It's really a pain to find a laptop that would not suck under Linux for any of the important dimensions (wifi, battery life, external monitor support, working fn keys and etc).
I have nothing but good things to say about Dell computers. Of course, I am a bit careful not to choose ATI or Nvidia graphics or anything that seems designed to run only Windows. The v131 I'm using now works perfectly (and came with Ubuntu preinstalled). Having a version that comes preinstalled with Linux is a good indicator the machine will work properly with it.
The trouble with Dell laptops is that the quality variance is really high. Mostly anecdotally speaking, I've found that the number of people who had a terrible experience with Dell and the number who had a good one are about equal.
The most common problem is the battery conking out after a year or so, and then the replacement choice is either a ridiculously expensive one from Dell (which costs a third of the laptop itself!) or a cheap Chinese gamble from ebay. The screen hinges also break sooner than later.
Still, I think on the cheaper end, Dell laptops are better than Acer and Toshiba. Their keyboards are not amazing but at least they don't try to do any cute stunts with them. The Vostro is surprisingly well built.
Shame the Ubuntu version is not available in the UK (or maybe I just failed their website easter egg hunt).
Please please please have an ultrabook style book on launch. I'm in the market for one and it seems most have trouble running ubuntu :-/. I need a reliable linux laptop seller, so good luck!
We're not doing our own brand machines (not yet ;-). Are you after any specific ultrabook already on the market? Frankly, we are not keen on any of them and find them quite poorly built for the price. The Macbook Airs are much better.
We're doing the Thinkpads because the keyboards are by far the best and the build very solid. The X1 is the closest to an ultrabook we could offer.
I was going to comment saying about the same thing as you: none of the ultrabooks on the market are quite there, particularly when it comes to build quality. I am a big fan of Thinkpads, however :)
Revorad, I've been looking at the x220t tablet for, wow, a long time. Any experience with these tablets under Ubuntu? Seems like that beastie, with 4G and an SSD, would be pretty nice. Kills me to buy a laptop that ships with Windows, though 1783 OTD seems not too crazy considering I'll probably be sinking a lot of time into tweaking Ubuntu anyway (or maybe suse -- one of the early tablet linux guys worked for Novell)
Upgrading from 11.10 to 12.04 killed my MacBookPro (5,5), it gets stuck on boot. Stopping system V runlevel compatibility shows up and then no more :( With recovery mode it hangs on the screen where you choose whether to boot normally or drop to root shell etc..
Not fun. Upgrading my PC from 11.10 to 12.04 resulted in not being able to boot. Grub giving error "no such partition." LiveCD + running boot-repair seems to have fixed it. I think the devs tinker with the OS too much resulting in breaking things but I just might be getting old and stodgy. With Gnu/Linux there is so many ways to do things there is bound to be a workaround or fix, but I just want the thing to work not be a tinkering nerd with the OS.
It's ironic that the top voted comment in this thread is about how wonderful Ubuntu is, followed by how we no longer need "ops" for linux, while further down we have problems like this bootloader update failure that no normal user could surmount.
Yeah, the Internet is the saving grace for many of these Gnu/Linux distributions for finding bug fixes. The OS should be Gnu/Linux/Internet as it would be a cripple without it.
Distribution Upgrade does hide the "Terminal" view by default. Which is kinda bad as at some point there are questions asked inside the terminal (stop services) which are thereby hidden and the installers just looks like it hangs.
Do you know why the launcher still can't be moved to the other side of the screen? Does it have to do with the idea that Ubuntu will also run on mobile devices?
When the benign dictator states that they're choosing aesthetics over functionality I know the project has stopped being useful to me.
I understand the need for a clear vision, but I have no idea why they cannot (and refuse to) allow a configuration option for this. Even if it's a line in a config file.
I'm one of those weird folk who run three monitors, and even though 12.04 promised better 2+ monitor support through Unity 2D, I still find it lacking. Perhaps it's the way I have it configured, but I use two nvidia cards with xinerama, which means I'm forced to use Unity 2D (no compositing support). Unity 2D just isn't as stable or usable. I really, really hope they put more effort to fixing this in 12.10.
I fought with this in the past. In the end I unhappily switched to back to windows running linux VMs after years of using linux as my primary desktop OS, and it was purely because of this failure.
Don't expect multiple graphics cards to work well under linux, at all. I tried this for quite awhile and there are a number of bugs. The one that bit me the most was that when a mouse cursor cross a screen boundary that switches GPUs and there is an animated cursor running, the mouse gets all messed up with the clicks being sent to the wrong screen, click on screen 1 and the event is sent to screen 2. I also had constant issues across many version of X with the Xorg process pegging a CPU core and making the system unusable.
Xinerama is all but deprecated it seems, RandR was supposed to replace the multiple graphics card support and allow multi-gpu composting but the project hasn't gotten around to it despite the fact that they've been talking about multi-gpu handling for more than 3 years.
My "workaround" for a long time was using a Matrox tripleHead2Go to let me get 4 monitors onto a single nvidia card. But, this approach has inherent limitations, all displays have to be oriented the same way and have to be side by side, what I wanted was one screen in landscape, 2 in portrait on the sides and a couple extra above.
At this point the best bet is hoping that wayland handles multi-gpus far better than X does.
TwinView works for two monitors on one graphics card, but once you get a second card you'll need xinerama, ergo no 3d support.
An ATI card that supports 3 monitors (needs to have a displayport connector and you need an "active" displayport adapter or a monitor with a displayport connector) should work. But don't tell anyone I recommended an ATI card for linux.
What ard0r said about TwinView. I'm anxiously awaiting TripletView from Nvidia...
ard0r, if you were to recommend an ATI card which had three display ports, what would it be? And, as a guy who has used nvidia with Linux for the past, oh, 14 years or so, can you tell me why you seem reluctant to recommend an ATI (AMD)? Am I inviting trouble by purchasing one?
The proprietary drivers have worked OK for me, but I've had issues with playing video. I just couldn't get smooth framerates. The radeon driver was worse in that aspect. I swapped in two nvidia cards and video looked much better. It should be fine for general use and I'm still trying to make the ATI setup work. I don't need 3D, just video.
I have a 5870 eyefinity 6 that has 6 display ports, but those are no longer made and expensive (and overkill).
I found a $60 Radeon HD 6450 card made by Sapphire on Newegg (N82E16814102960) that has two dvi and one displayport, that should work for three monitors. There are other options as well of course, just make sure the cards are advertised as supporting eyefinity and they have at least one displayport adapter. I've had success with an Accel active displayport to DVI adapters.
Thanks....I may try an AMD. I don't need 3D support either, but I do need compositing support (does no 3D mean no compositing? Not sure...).
Not having compositing on the linux desktop these days means you're a second class season. Both Unity and Gnome3 require it to function...if you don't have it, you have to fall back to Unity2D (incomplete user experience) or Gnome 2 (no longer supported. KDE actually does the best of the bunch when it comes to Xinerama so far, but I really prefer Unity or Gnome3.
I've read that if you buy two similar Nvidia cards (same GPUs), you can get compositing across three monitors, but I've not spoken with anyone who can verify. If anyone reading this can, please provide your vid card model.
Do you know if this Radeon HD 6450 will support compositing across three monitors? $60 is cheap to me to get this.
I'm currently using a NVIDIA GT218 (for one monitor) and a GT520 (for two other monitors) on my Arch Linux system. Although Xinerama support is nearly unusable with this setup (most likely due to the different chipsets on the cards), you can do TwinView (for two monitors) and a separate X screen (for the third) or 3 separate xscreens. I just do 3 separate xscreens (I'm a gamer and don't like to see my quake client stretched across two of my monitors and my TV :) ). You can't move windows between monitors with Xinerama or TwinView, but that's a sacrifice I was willing to make for my configuration. I am able to do compositing across all three of my monitors with this configuration.
Actually, it "does", but it requires some magical incantations, and you end up with a virtual desktop with lots of off-screen pixels, and your desktop/window manager has problems figuring that out. That's why I started using the Nouveau drivers; it fully supports Xrandr, which means you can use the desktop manager's built-in screen rotation abilities.
Thanks for that. I've been meaning to retry the Nouveau drivers... ISTR there was some other thing that they didn't support which is why I don't use them. Guess I'll have to try to re-enable them again to learn what that is.
Ah yes... think I remember now... they didn't like connecting one of my monitors with DisplayPort. Or didn't seem to.
I've recently ordered 3x 21.5" monitors for developing with. It'll be interesting to see how Precise / Unity handles that setup. I have either Nvidia Optimus on my T420s Thinkpad or ATI 5970s to test with.
Developing what with? I got hacked off with issues with multiple monitors - and in the end - just went back to one monitor with multiple work spaces. I figured in the end they were nothing but a distraction.
I use gnome-shell instead of Unity on Ubuntu, and have multiple monitors. I use focus follows mouse not click to focus, so unity's whole app menu thing is ridiculous. I actually measured that I'd have to move the mouse over a metre on screen for my common window layout to get to menus. Sure I could fight all this, but I'd rather use something that is standard across distros and not Ubuntu proprietary.
That said, gnome-shell doesn't work correctly with multiple monitors. In particular workspaces affect the first monitor but not the second one so they are annoying to use. Sometimes programs going full screen on the second monitor can't be restored. There are no context menu items to move items amongst workspaces. Since the available space on each screen differs (resolution, various bars) windows can end up with the wrong size.
None of these issues existed with Gnome 2. Gnome 3 was basically 5 steps forward and 10 steps back. I do like some of those forward steps. Unfortunately the cost turns out to be loss of functionality and humungous CPU/memory consumption (I upgraded my 8GB machine to 16GB because of it!)
That is the exact same spec as my laptop. I don't actually notice performance problems from gnome shell because I spend most of my time typing with short bursts of compilation etc. But when running top, gnome shell is always up there and has accumulated a huge amount of CPU time. More than X and the web browsers put together usually. Memory consumption varies so where I notice problems is when things have been swapped out because of gnome shell memory usage. I've never had it around 10gb but Alan Cox has https://plus.google.com/111104121194250082892/posts/5f5XXtRG...
Yep...in case anyone comes back to this thread, I purchase an AMD Sapphire Radeon FLEX HD 6770 1GB DDR5 PCIe 2.1, and Unity works perfectly across all three now using the proprietary drivers, and setting the "Multi-display desktop" option for each monitor in the amdcccle utility.
I haven't tried it with 12.04 yet, but I've had poor experience getting Gnome installed and running decently in the last couple versions of Ubuntu. It seems like Fedora is the easiest way to use it.
I have. Gnome 3 refuses to load with three monitors on Xinerama...but I have heard it works ok with two...just as Unity does. It's when you go to three that things get rough.
As someone who went to Fedora 16 after the initial Unity debacle, I've been using 12.04 on my laptops, and I must say, it's generally been a pleasant experience.
I still haven't tried with multi-screens, so I'm not sure how well it works there.
After a few tweaks, I'm rather chuffed with 12.04:
- Change icons down to 32x32
- Auto-hide drawer
- Change theme to Radiance
- Set terminal font to 10 and colors to white on black / Linux colors.
I recommend people give it a second chance, particularly on laptops.
OT: There was an "Ellen" clip or something that was posted somewhere about UK-vs-US slangs words and iirc 'chuff' was there (the USAian didn't know what it was). I had to look up the definition to understand 100% whether you were pleased or displeased. :)
I've been teaching the beta for a while now, I like it. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS comes with new vagrant, puppet and arduino 1.0. And with Xubuntu, you can use a traditional desktop. Some of my experiences teaching with the beta
http://terokarvinen.com/2012/xubuntu-12-04-lts-on-vappu
I've been using Xubuntu 12.04 for a few weeks now (beta) and it has converted me back from Debian/Mint. If you don't love Unity, give Xubuntu 12.04 a try before you mess around trying to hack a different DE on Ubuntu.
In the past, Xubuntu felt kind of awkward, at least to me. It felt as though XFCE was sort of mashed on top of Ubuntu, with too much Ubuntu showing through the cracks. But 12.04 feels like 100% its own product.
If Canonical is reading this, please put up a torrent link on the main page with both versions. Obviously your servers can't handle the load right now.
They should work on apt-diffs first which Redhat already does. The torrent idea may not be practical because your machine would have to be running the torrentable-apt-get to act as a peer. I doubt many people would want to leave that running and the short 10 second connections would not be enough to sustain the swarm.
You can also torrent the CD and create a sources.list entry to use the CD as a source, which will let you upgrade most packages (though obviously only packages that are on the CD). You can even loopback-mount the ISO, so you don't need to actually burn it.
Been using the Beta releases for a while now and I'm hooked, Unity has matured in to a really well thought out and compelling desktop environment.
My absolute favorite feature is hitting the alt key (from any app) and being about to navigate the menus and options e.g. in FireFox Alt > Type "Edit" and i see all the options available - Very Slick and means i can use the keyboard to effectively navigate all apps now, Previous versions of unity didn't really lend themselves to this.
> Hibernate (suspend to disk) has been disabled by default, as it was found to be unreliable, very slow and confusing to have two suspend modes. See bug 812394 for details. If you want to re-enable it, please follow this recipe.
As someone who runs Ubuntu on a laptop with a dead battery, that's somewhat unfortunate.
> The mail client Evolution may delete folders and their contents as they are renamed or moved around in IMAP (and IMAP+) accounts. It is recommended to copy folders and contents before attempting to move or rename them. (957341)
Ouch! I'm surprised a bug that big with a default application wasn't a release blocker.
That probably just means the 'hibernate' option was removed from the dialogs. You should still be able to invoke it from the power management tools via a terminal. I'm not on ubuntu but does this still work:
Yes, it can be, and the next bit says as much. I've pasted in the rest of the bullet point to clarify. I was just disappointed that such a thing has to be enabled manually now.
I'd like to know how the 10.04 -> 12.04 upgrade goes in places that use the Long Term Support (LTS) Ubuntu releases as end user machines. The change in UI is quite radical if you have not worked thru' 11.04 and 11.10 6 monthly releases. It struck me that there may be people here who have access/work in organisations with large deployments.
I'd be interested in knowing about the training issues that arose and what action was taken, and how people like the new interface. Sort of a high volume test of Canonical's user testing driven design.
I imagine most of the large volume upgrades will be taking place after 12.04.1 is released sometime June.
We as humans and programmers are creatures of habit, Unity by being a relatively new technology will break some habits in our work ritual. Give it a few years and nobody will complain about this.
I found Unity awkward at first, but I put in a few days' honest effort to learn to shortcuts and try to work as the designers intended me to, and it improved my desktop efficiency quite a bit, and removed a fair bit of clutter compared to Gnome 2. I like Gnome Shell too for the same reasons.
That said, Unity was buggy in 11.04, and only somewhat less so in 11.10, and I still find myself having to occasionally escape to a terminal and restart Unity after it freezes up. I'm hoping 12.04 is better.
I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for the past month and must say it is pretty stable for a beta version and I'm so glad that final version is out. Hoping to stick with it until Ubuntu 14.04
Has anyone tried using this on a netbook? My wife is interested in trying Linux, and I was thinking Ubuntu (or Lubuntu) might be a good choice for her. Speed is an issue for her and one of the reasons she's not satisfied with Windows. I'd introduce her to Gentoo, but I don't think she'd appreciate the joy of GNU make.
My netbook is running Lubuntu 11.10. It was previously running Ubuntu 10.x Netbook Edition and Ubuntu 10.04. They work. (I like Gentoo too, but I don't want to do much compiling on a netbook.)
Most GUI programs aren't designed to use in 1024x600. For example, it's hard to actually read email in Thunderbird because there isn't much room for text after subtracting pixels for window decorations, menu bar, toolbar, header bar, and status bar. I think a netbook would benefit from a tiling window manager, but I haven't got around to installing one yet.
I am currently running it on my Toshiba NB 305 net book. I've been pleased with the performance overall, but on the few occasions where I needed more power, I switched desktop environments to lxde and performance was boosted.
You're welcome! It will be customizable, but not to the extent of the GNOME panels. Part of the other problem is that it's still new, so developers don't want to build a lot of stuff with it.
I installed beta 2 and run into issues with disk power management. By default it had a very small timeout to spin down. Fixed manually with hdparm -S, but I didn't see any updates that correct it. If you notice your drive clicking all the time, there's your fix...
I had this problem when watching movies from the disk, oddly enough. It kept shutting down the hard drive when it was reading from the memory buffer, then when the buffer ran out it needed to pause while the drive spun back up. I haven't tried the final to see if it's fixed.
We built and added Ubuntu 12.04 to our provisioning system for cloud servers at SSD Nodes (http://www.ssdnodes.com). It boots very quickly on our hypervisors at just 5-10 seconds.
I'm pretty sure your claim about the 45,000 IOPs being the most of any SATA SSDs is no longer true.
The (consumer grade) Intel 520 SSDs claim 80,000 random write IOPs, and I think I remember seeing the cheaper SATA SSDs on the Dell R720s doing 100K+ (obviously the SAS SSDs do more as do FusionIOs and PCI based express flash)
But to bring it back to Ubuntu - do you use the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution or what?
They're still ridiculously fast. Once we can justify the expense, I would love to get Fusion-IO's or the Micron P320h's on our platform.
Regarding Ubuntu, we're just using the vanilla Ubuntu 12.04 server distribution for our image templates. Of course, if people wanted OpenStack we would support it and possibly create another template for easy provisioning.
Has anyone tried to dist-upgrade? Does it work well?
Around the time I was a Ubuntu user (around Hardy 8.04), dist-upgrade would usually break your box and was discouraged by Canonical themselves. If I recall correctly.
dist-upgrade won't upgrade you to the next release, just updates your current release. You want do-release-upgrade. And I've never had a problem with dist-upgrade.
Is there a reason that Canonical doesn't make upgrading via torrent more front-and-center? It seems like on huge release days like today they'd want the swarm to lend itself a hand.
I guess probably to simplify things, the less links to "get" the product the better, especially if they are going after less savvy users who may also believe that bittorrent is illegal or shady in some way.
i'm thinking of triple-booting my 2009 MBP with Ubuntu (already Bootcamped with Win7). anyone has experience with Ubuntu on MBPs? any problem with hardware? i need a lightweight-but-nice-looking OS for day-to-day Java development (i use IntelliJ), Lion is taxing too much.
Running ubuntu as my main OS on my 2011 MBP for a while. Everything works and is stable except for the wireless driver, which you have to compile yourself and only supports wireless G. Things may have changed in the last months though. I don't know about the 2009 MBP hardware.
I've been running 11.04 on my 2010 MBP for a while. It drains the battery pretty quickly. I had to mess around with the trackpad settings a bit to get that into a usable state, and I had to disable tap-to-click completely because it completely sucks at palm rejection. The startup screen is completely screwy and it often fails to turn the machine off when shutting down.
Triple booting on Santa Rosa 2007 MBP. Upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard and had many problems, lack of recovery partition, Spotlight failure etc. Need to reformat and reinstall all to get spotlight working again.
I had severe difficulty getting Ubuntu to appear as a bootable partition when installed from a USB stick. Don't install from stick, install from a disc. Whatever it did with EFI didn't work right, there were partitions on my hard drive that Mac OS X wouldn't touch, it was a mess.
I had to repartition and reformat my HD and restore from Time Machine.
To set up my optimal configuration, I have a bash script that I run right after installing Ubuntu.
Based on the fact that I was able to remove lines and not add new ones to this script, I'd say this release is pretty good.
Gripe: Ubuntu One still takes ages to sync up.
Praise: Sticky edges for multiple monitors; they're really handy when scrolling or otherwise doing something near the edge between the screens (and can be turned off if you don't like them).
I usually praise the rich ecosystem of custom packages and (PPA) repositories available for Ubuntu. It means you get the stability and security of a distribution-maintained main repository as well as the up-to-date or even cutting edge nature of developer-maintained repositories.
Unfortunately, it's a huge pain in the ass when updating. Packages in PPAs are built with a specific distribution in mind, and distribution release x packages aren't supported in release x+1. I think the recommended routine when upgrading is to purge all custom PPAs you are using before you upgrade. And then add them back, if available, after upgrading. Of course, you might not even need the PPA since x+1 might already have the program version you need.
Still, upgrading is already a somewhat fragile process, and using lots of PPAs makes it even more prone to breaking. The upside is that it's really easy and safe to clean install over an existing install, particularly if you've got /home on it's own partition.
I have never had serious breakage after a distribution upgrade due to PPA repositories. Au contraire, the upgrade manager takes care to disable third party repositories automatically.
Now, that doesn't mean that things are always flawless. My main complaint is with a) bugs in the release itself, and b) the many reckless changes in paradigm, sometimes flawed by design, and implemented with half-finished software (upstart and Unity come to mind). Because of a), I usually wait a month to upgrade.
b) is more serious, and though it sometimes isn't Canonical' s fault (I'm looking at you, Gnome!), it is why I dread dist-upgrades. Finding reasonably functional and bug-free alternatives to the junk they want to shove down my throat sometimes takes months. For instance, I have only just yesterday found a decent desktop to replace Gnome2 (Mint's Cinnamon), after being homeless since the release of 11.04.
Still, I wouldn't swap Ubuntu for any other distro (not even Mint, which is just another _buntu, so why bother)! The PPA system is brilliant. The community is huge, so even if bugs aren't fixed, workarounds and patches abound.
And last but not least, it's the only distro I can even consider doing a dist-upgrade with the hopes of having a working system after it's done.
Apparently using ppa-purge is only necessary for certain critical PPAs like x-updates. Still, I think the process is fragile even if it's mostly automatic: who's to say the version you end up with after the upgrade is compatible with the one from a PPA you had been using before the upgrade.
If you don't like or have trouble with Unity, try one of the other Ubuntu variants. I love lubuntu (lxde-based), it's just windows and a panel. Anything that gets between my windows and panel (like Unity) gets thrown over the side without even a wave goodbye. Lubuntu is what xubuntu once aspired to, lightweight and simple.
What is Ubuntu? It's the "easy" Linux distro built on a highly curated version of the debian repository and their apt package system. Mainstream Ubuntu also has Unity. It has a large user base, and a large developer community. It's a nice place to be.
When Unity first hit my laptop, I went running to Mint, only to discover that they've made a search deal. I then looked at other debian-based distros, but I missed ubuntu's curated repository. While flirting with other debians, I discovered lxde, and then lubuntu. I'm there, for now.
I have an exopc slate that I'm trying to use with Linux, and have had no luck for the last year.
12.04 doesn't make it better - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/utouch/+bug/801988 has all the details (for the W500, but it's the same bug). Touching the screen with two fingers causes X to blow up. Touching with one finger at the wrong place causes X selection to lock-up for a few minutes. I'm almost tempted to go to Windows 7... I hope it gets fixed soon.
Meego 1.2 is able to use the touchscreen without multitouch (but is otherwise unusable as a distribution).
Does anyone have good experience with any ubuntu distribution on an eGalax / DWAV capacitive multitouch screen?
As much as Ubuntu has matured over the years, I am pretty disappointed how many things are broken out of the box still. Being behind a proxy is a major pain as ever, as well as getting ATI graphics drivers to work properly.
the ATI card wasn't up to me and it is really the proxy support that is the most disappointing. There are bug reports dating several years back that still haven't been addressed
It has really come a long way, you may try it now. I was also in the league of people couldn't stand for Unity when it launched, but now I'm using it for couple of weeks now, its been very pleasant.
There are two kinds of people who hated Unity when it first came out. The first kind of people were mostly unhappy about Unity's bugginess and lack of functionality. These folks should be OK by now. The second kind of people just don't like the UI paradigm that Unity represents. Nothing they can ever do will make them happy with Unity.
After all, that's why Ubuntu has alternative DEs! I use Xubuntu on my netbook and I'm lovin' it. (Unity 3D is too much for that little bugger.)
I switched to Xubuntu as well when Unity hit for all of my machines. I think I'm going to give Unity a shot this time on at least one of my laptops and see what happens.
It has occurred to me that most things I want to use require GDK anyways, so XFCE isn't all that light weight any more.
You're right, XFCE isn't all that "lightweight" when you add in all the things you need to make it usable.
XFCE still feels faster than GNOME or KDE on old hardware, probably because it doesn't use any semi-transparent 3D gimmicks. It is also shaping up to be a very good option for those who prefer the old GNOME look. The panel and most other UI elements are even more configurable than I remember GNOME 2 to have been. I'll be sticking with Xubuntu 12.04 for quite some time.
I'm conflicted really. I am used to the old GNOME desktop, so XFCE just feels like home to me... I'll miss right-clicking my desktop for instance... but I feel that in order to better support customers going forward I need to get used to the UI's that they will be using.
I do very little Linux support currently, but there are talks of deploying Linux in our schools very soon and I can't see them using anything other than Ubuntu. It will do me well to have familiarity with the product. I'm upgrading my desktop to Xubuntu 12.04 now, but I think I'm going to switch my secondary laptop to Ubuntu and start getting used to it.
I've had teenagers using a couple of netbooks in classes running 12.04. No fuss, just handed them the netbook to access Moodle course in-class during group work, along with a few College windows laptops.
No problem. Just needed a word about how clicking on the 'cog wheel' to close Firefox won't work (windows controls hidden until mouse over). They just clicked around the interface to find things.
That's really what I expect from implementing Ubuntu in our current classrooms.
West Virginia is making a BIG push on the school districts to have a 1:1 student/computer ratio. Most districts going forward with it are purchasing netbooks to cut costs. Their technology budgets are already thin and they are desperately looking for ways of trimming even more to make room for more machines.
Campus wifi? A central server running Moodle as the VLE in each school? It could work very well for them. The further education college in which I work has Windows, but they have installed GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity college wide. Some great work with Audacity, people find GIMP a bit harder. Inkscape isn't used much (but then neither is Adobe Illustrator).
Most of the larger schools (Middle/High) already have campus wide wifi. Some of the larger elementary schools do as well.
The big push right now is for VM Ware. Some of the counties are going to a district-wide WAN for serving up VMs from a central NOC.
That sounds great. Wifi/Internet enabled netbooks in a class one to a group can encourage discussion and carefully planned research if the teacher just thinks through the pedagogy a bit.
The thing is, I need my taskbar: one click to change to another window, and I usually have several browser windows opened (each with several tabs) and hate having to right-click the application icon to choose the window. That's why on Windows I have the classic taskbar (never grouping windows) and on Mac OS... I just keep hating the dock.
I keep trying Unity every once in a while, but I always find it difficult to bring up exactly the right window I want. So I go back to Gnome, which has the task bar where I can simply click something to maximize it, and click it again to minimize it.
I'm gonna try Unity again, because I want to like it, but I always find myself getting angry at the "application-centric" grouping of my open windows, and how when it zooms out and I click the window I want, all sorts of other things I'm using become obscured.
From what I can tell, it does work ok with Cinnamon. You can also revert to a gnome2.x-style panel - full instructions here - http://askubuntu.com/q/58172/6005
amd64 is the name for the architecture that both intel and amd use in their 64-bit desktop processors. It has that name because it was originally amd that released the architecture (and intel used itanium at the time).
"After launching the architecture under the "x86-64" name, AMD renamed it AMD64 in 2003; Intel initially used the names IA-32e and EM64T before finally settling on Intel 64 for their implementation. x86-64 is still used by many in the industry as a vendor-neutral term, while others, notably Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation) and Microsoft, use x64."
After building a new machine for work this month, I was looking for a new distro to install due to the hassle I had with unity before (11.04 with 2 monitors -- it wouldn't even place windows on the second screen).
Out of loyality (ubuntu user since 5.04) I gave the 12.04 beta a go and was genuinely pleasantly surprised with unity. I've opted to keep 12.04. The multiple monitors works well for me (though not an exotic set up 2x23" matched monitors, Nvidia GFX).
I just spent over an hour last night upgrading one of my laptops to 11.10 because 12.04 was still beta. I guess I should have just waited one more day.
If you were coming from 11.04, you'd have to upgrade to 11.10 anyway, since you can only upgrade from one release directly to the next one, or one LTS to the next. That's why I suspect you were on 11.04 and not 10.04 (it's not possible to upgrade directly from 10.04 or 10.10 to 11.10).
The alternative would have been a clean reinstall.
Been using this for the past month or so - performs well, stable, and I'm still getting used to the HUD. Once I become a master of the HUD, I'll be all set.
I did have to do some tweaking to the default workspace management keybindings to be truly happy with the install, however. But if someone is coming in without any preexisting biases, the defaults may suit them just fine. (Hit the Super or "Windows" key for a guide)
The notifications in the newer Ubuntu really do irritate me. In releases of old (if my memory is correct), notifications could be clicked to bring up the program that was notifying you. Now they just go semi-transparent and can't be clicked, so I have to open the program manually. Not a huge deal, but it could have a better UX by being interactive (I'd love to be able to reply to a chat message within the notification window, ala Digsby).
> Now they just go semi-transparent and can't be clicked
I'm running 10.10 and it's the same as you describe. Which I think is the right way to do it, for anything that pops up unexpectedly.
Thunderbird (and others) doe notifications the way you describe, but I don't think ubuntu (or any other distribution, or even osx for that matter) ever let you click directly on the system-wide notifications.
My old Lenovo r51 is still on hardy heron 8.04. I used to read the release notes for Ubuntu to see if I could upgrade hassle free. There was a new Linux intel video driver which was a step back for a while: poor video play back and no compiz. Maybe it is time to get that ssd and upgrade os!
I'm only seeing beta2 available for download. I've tried several alternative links, like mirrors.kernel.org... and all I can find anywhere is beta2, as the latest version available. #impatient :)
Well, let's see if this one manages to recognize and correctly use all the hardware devices of my Asus laptop. 11.04&11.10 were so bad for it I had to revert to 10.04 which I'm still using.
Boot from the disk and tell it to upgrade your 11.10 installation, saving your /home folder and so on. I did exactly this on two workstations and found it works quite well ..
I roasted my Xubuntu desktop today doing this. Wiped my Windows partition as well. I'm not sure why it hung, I left work before I could test things and research.
I just boot from disk so I can get the upgrade done as quickly as possible. This way, my machine does everything it needs to upgrade, without anything else going on. Then when its done, I let it update in the background while I make sure everything went smoothly.
In this case, it went very smoothly for me, and was worth the hassle. I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.04, which had been rather a bit of a mess actually, in the Unity/Gnome3/fvwm shell department, as in I had them all and had to switch around to get certain things I liked. Unity crashed too often (in 11.04) for me to trust it.
That has all changed. I am now running Ubuntu studio, which features fvwm, and nothing else. Gnome only if I truly need it, and Unity .. after the dust settles.
So I'm quite comfortable in my upgrade to 12.04, and everything works like it should - full multi-channel digital audio, multi-monitor support with acceleration, and so on.
To me, it's good to have a disk with the last version of ubuntu in case I need it. So if I download the disk and boot from it, I'll only download it once, versus downloading the iso + downloading the upgrade.
Also, the upgrade to a new version famously have many problems. I just tried it and it crashed in the middle :S
I'm pretty sure in the past that the upgrade software itself was updated, so you have to update the old packages first to make sure the new stuff installs properly.
I'm not sure upgrading servers is the best pattern to use when running on cloud platforms. It's really easy to just launch a new instance and redeploy your software (and make that process as automated as possible)
I have been at a clients location with my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop today.
The "IT guy" there and all the other (non IT) office staff asked me what this is and how they could get it. I had to do a full 15 minutes of explanations about Ubuntu. You cannot imagine the looks after I told them it is free.
Firstly I will say, I like Microsoft. I'm sitting here on a Win7 laptop (dual boot Ubuntu) and have a Windows Phone next to me.
But I don't like the culture that follows it around.
I like Ubuntu and see it as a much more positive model and a more extensible, cheaper system. However we have some problems to contend with...
Here's how it works where I work (SME - 100 people - UK - Financial sector):
Show a user Ubuntu - "ooh that's really nice - feels better than windows".
Show a dev/architect Ubuntu - "yeah we already use it at home for everything and we run a few VMs without letting operations know - want me to friend you on bitbucket?"
User approaches operations for a test machine - "NO!" and a load of FUD about how Linux is cancer and Microsoft is Jesus' sandals and "I'll replace you with a very small powershell script (if I can get the signing right)".
Dev/architect approaches operations for a test machine - "NO!" then silence with no attempt to get into a discussion.
Any discussion raised ends up with the "we're a microsoft shop and that's not going to change".
This is the same company which runs everything on ESX which is Linux underneath, has Linux-based virtual firewall and load balancer appliances, uses Linux-based Android phones, Unix-based iOS devices everywhere and ironically runs it's entire phone system on Linux.
At the other extreme, we have to run memcached on windows otherwise ops will get all antsy.
Clueless monocultural operations teams that want to protect their worth are who are causing serious problems.
We need some marketing tied to "you dont need an ops team anymore" or "cheaper, more efficient ops teams are possible with Linux" (which they are) and you will get somewhere.
This is the THIRD place I've seen this now so it's rife.
When I started at one large Brazilian portal, our ops team served both the home page and the images off IIS boxes. Many people on the team knew how stupid it was and there were scripts running (on Linux, obviously) scanning the Windows boxes for malware (every day or so, somehow, an infected flash or a defaced weaponized HTML file appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
The clueless idiot who managed the team kept on resurrecting benchmarks from the 90's on how Windows was better for serving static content. When it finally became obvious that all the problems were due to their technical choices, they botched two attempts to migrate the servers to Linux. They configured Apache in such a way it kept on allocating memory until the machines crashed every 25 hours or so. I won't attribute that to malice. They were really incompetent and misconfiguring a web server in this way required more brainpower than they had.
We eventually fired him and most of his minions. They now work at a Microsoft partner.
Sad. I've used Linux ever since Windows Vista drivers prevented me from making programs full screen without crashing the OS. That was when I said enough.
I started with Ubuntu, but the updates always break on me. So now I'm giving a Debian a go. I'm amazed how much like Ubuntu 8.04-9.10 it is--the Gnome 2 desktop is nice and simple. That's unfortunately an option Canonical has taken away from its distro.
Seems surprising that the IT guy didn't know about it though, can't be many people in the IT world (even dyed in the wool Windows guys) that haven't heard of Ubuntu.
Honestly, you'd be surprised. The IT world includes a lot of people who train up from help desk or similar positions, and spend their time very focused on the specific class of problems they're dealing with. Not surprised at all that someone described as the "IT Guy" might be a small company's only tech, trained up from a non-IT position and with no experience at all outside their tiny ecosystem.
This is pretty common. In many cases they are strictly the hands and eyes of the technician. I know a large company 300+ where their IT guy was there only to call someone who knew more.
I'm also familiar with a situation at many smaller banks where their IT person is the youngest of the VPs. Of course they use external IT services and audits, but for day to day IT problems you go to the VP of whatever first.
I recently bought a computer from a computer reseller (great way to go, IMHO) who had never heard of Ubuntu. He had tried to install Red Hat once back in the day, but that was about it.
Gnome3 ships with a mode that looks and acts basically identically to gnome2/gnome-panel. I don't understand at all the desire to use gnome-panel, but it's all right there out of box. I groan every time I hear people mention Cinnamon, Mint and Xubuntu because they don't like Gnome-Shell.
The gnome-panel interface (fallback mode) is going to go away eventually. Gnome developers have been working to "make gnome-shell work with software-rendering" so that "Gnome can phase out some components that are only kept alive because they are needed in the fallback mode, which allows more resources to be focused on improving Gnome 3".
I'm really hoping 12.04 is good. I upgraded to 11.04 on my laptop some time ago and detested it. Went back to 10.04 after that. I'm curious about that new search bar thing they're supposed to be implementing.
And isn't Shuttleworth coming out with a tablet Ubuntu? I thought that was going to be this release, but i dont see it mentioned ...
The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity launcher to the right hand side of my main screen, the 22" display, so that it doesn't get in the way of scrolling to the laptop's screen.
Sounds simple right? Switching the launcher from left to right? Wrong. http://askubuntu.com/questions/123552/unity-launcher-on-righ...
In short, I'm advised to switch to a whole different desktop manager for that simple functionality. What a crock of shit.
I still like it for laptops, but this inflexibility ruins it for multi-displays. BRB, installing another desktop manager...
A few more links on the subject:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/740391
http://askubuntu.com/questions/33605/can-i-move-the-unity-la...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/2