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."
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 ..
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 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.
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'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 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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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'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 :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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)
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!
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadAlso, I'm not too familiar with it, so why does it imply that the 64 bit version only works on AMD CPU's? Is there no 64 bit version for Intel?
And those are usually mean old bearded Unix old-timers that will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and [condescending] anger.
And you do not want to upset these people.
Disclaimer I'm a young Unix old-timer, currently growing a beard.
* almost everyone who cares
"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."
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.
I'd guess from the phrasing that suspend-to-disk can still be enabled, it just isn't by default.
$> sudo pm-hibernate
Then turn it back on. If everything works ok, you can permanently add it back to the system menu with these scripts:
https://github.com/repos-ubuntu/tweaks
Need two files:
https://github.com/repos-ubuntu/tweaks/blob/master/reenable-...
https://github.com/repos-ubuntu/tweaks/blob/master/reenable-...
Instructions and links to more detailed instructions in the .sh comments.
'pmi action hibernate'
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)
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.
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.
Also, the upgrade to a new version famously have many problems. I just tried it and it crashed in the middle :S
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.
The fastest way to do it from the shell
press the super key type : update-manager and it will tell you there is an upgrade on top. Hit the upgrade button....
At any rate, better safe than sorry.
All you need to ensure is you have decent video card/drivers
Unity has great support for multiple-monitors. Many, if not most, of the problems are due to: X, the video card drivers and Xinerama.
I always disabled Unity until now, precisely for the reason that it didn't work for me on this laptop that is often docked with 2 monitors.
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!)
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.
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?
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.
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.
Thanks!
Anyway, I hope this helps!
Ah yes... think I remember now... they didn't like connecting one of my monitors with DisplayPort. Or didn't seem to.
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.
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.
PSA: chuff == Brit slang for to please or delight (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chuff)
You can't exactly say you haven't been warned.
Ubuntu is now my main OS.
I had to repartition and reformat my HD and restore from Time Machine.
It can help with some of the multi-boot problems people tend to have with Ubuntu on MBP.
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.
Ubuntu swapped out the common notification daemon for one called notify-osd.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel
If you're interested in buying Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed and fully tested, please sign up here - http://giniji.com/ubuntu_laptops.html
</plug>
This is a tiny first step towards making a new computer company. Just need some love from hackers.
Btw, we will offer free shipping :-)
Can you offer the lower price point on your and a higher price on amazon?
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.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/2
There are some unofficial plugins which allow you to do it, but that will break future bug updates.
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 miss the NeXT feel of having it on the right.
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.
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.
http://dell.com/ubuntu
The specs on the Vostro 1440 don't seem much different than the Inspiron 1420N I bought with Ubuntu 5 years ago.
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).
I don't think they are available in Brazil either and, in any case, the keyboard layout is not to my taste.
Here's the fix: http://askubuntu.com/questions/125428/grub-complains-of-no-s...
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.
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?
edit: I should've looked before speculating about Emperor. I gather that they order a machine from the manufacturer when a customer orders http://www.emperorlinux.com/quality/?page=configure but they have some kind of relationship with the manufacturer, not just retail http://www.emperorlinux.com/why/ (see warranty at bottom).
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.
I don't believe it's a coincidence!
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.
It's generally better than dist-upgrade anyway.
My laptop battery life jumped from 4.5hrs to 7, kernel panics with too many Chrome tabs open and/or Flash playing are a thing of the past, etc.
One of the best upgrades I've ever done.
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com/2010/02/dist-upgra...
Seamless release upgrade is crucial if you want to have a high frequency (6 month) release cycle. Glad to see they made progress with this.
http://omgubuntu.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
http://omgubuntu.co.uk.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
You should add more info like "Hey, a little OT, but here's how the process works. Etc" to avoid down votes for lack of contribution.
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.
If this were Reddit, I'd be attaching the Jackie Chan face right about here.
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.
If you want to know what the process was, why not just ask? If you don't actually care, then just move on.
Thank you for trying to keep up the quality of conversation here.
The process for choosing an Ubuntu wallpaper goes thusly:
* A new, public flickr group is created.
* People bung their photos/art in there.
* The previous 'winners' choose the next wallpapers.
So, you had two of your photos chosen for this release or no? Is that rare?
Thanks for the context in how it works. Do you see any trends in what gets picked over what doesn't. I assume more abstract is usually better?