 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 454, 30 April 2012 |
Welcome to this year's 18th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The first stable release of Calligra (a fork of KOffice) was announced recently. As a full-featured suite of office applications for the KDE desktop, Calligra certainly merits a closer look, but will it be able to compete on a desktop already dominated by the heavyweight LibreOffice? Jesse Smith takes a first look at the new arrival in this week's feature article. In the news section, plenty of information and links related to the new stable release of Ubuntu, including two absorbing interviews with prominent Ubuntu personalities and the announcement about the next version of Ubuntu whose code name was also revealed last week. Also in the news section, we link to an analysis of the current state of Mandriva Linux, another to a blog post describing the upgrade process from Fedora 16 to Fedora 17 beta, and a third one to an interesting interview with Artyom Zorin, the founder and leader developer of Zorin OS. Also in this issue, a Questions & Answers section about the advantages of using native applications designed for a specific desktop, an additional note on OpenSSH, and the usual round-up of last week's releases with all the screenshots galore. Happy reading!
Content:
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (31MB) and MP3 (32MB) formats
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
The new Calligra office suite
 It has been several years since I spent any significant amount of time with the productivity suite known as KOffice. The project, designed to work hand-in-hand with the KDE desktop, has maintained a small niche over the years by being an office suite with a small foot print that features an interface designed to fit in with other KDE/Qt software.
Recently there has been a split in the productivity suite's developer community which has given birth to the new, and reworked, Calligra suite. Calligra has just hit its first stable release and I opted to take it for a test run to see how it stacked up next to other office software such as LibreOffice. What I decided to do was to try to use Calligra for all of my word processing and spreadsheet needs for a week, plus make an effort to set up a database, create diagrams and produce graphics and slide presentations. Some of these things aren't tasks I perform on a regular basis, but I've gone through the processes on both open source and proprietary office suites in the past, so I feel comfortable making a comparison.
Before getting into the details, I want to say up front that the version of Calligra I was using for my experiment was not the final stable release, but a late beta version, Beta 6 to be specific. My repository does not feature the final release at time of writing. Beta 6 was followed by Beta 7, plus a release candidate, so some of the features and bugs I bring up may not be mirrored in the final version.
Calligra Words
The first application in the suite I tried was Words, the Calligra word processor. We start off simply enough, being able to choose between a few available templates and then we're given the typical blank page. Calligra seems to make the assumption most users will be using wide screens and the editing tools, formating buttons and layout buttons are positioned to the right of the window. Along the top of the window we find a menu bar with the standard File, Edit, View... menus and a thin toolbar featuring common file and editing options. With a little experimenting I found the large toolbox at the side of the window could be moved to the left, made to float freely around the window or be hidden, depending on the user's preference. At the bottom of the window we find a status bar where page, layout and zoom/scale information are displayed. We can also click on these indicators to manipulate them. For example, we can click where the current page number is displayed, type a new page number and Words will jump to that page.
Calligra Words 2.4 - word processing
(full image size: 81kB, screen resolution 1366x710 pixels)
As far as presentation was concerned I found Words to have two things working in its favour, the first being that it was flexible. So often I hear people complain about ribbon (or the lack of) interfaces and what I suspect is really the deeper issue is programs should allow users to adjust their menus to work the way they want, rather than force one approach or the other. Words, and the Calligra suite as a whole, does a nice job of picking reasonable settings, but let's us alter them or remove items completely. We start with a toolbox, toolbar, status bar, etc, but these can be turned off if we want just a plain menu and an empty page.
As for what Words does, aside from allowing us to adjust the furniture, I found it to be a very light word processor in terms of features. For example, there doesn't appear to be any obvious way to add images into a document. We seem to be faced with a text-only environment. We can adjust fonts, format pages and paragraphs. We can adjust colours and insert tables. We have the option of exporting documents to PDF format or saving in either Open Document or HTML formats.
When using Words I was reminded of the often repeated claim that 90% of word processor users only need 10% of the features available in the big productivity suites. It seems Calligra is testing that theory, presenting a light edition of a word processor, one which makes its few items easy to find (as there is no clutter) and easy to customize. In my case the 90-10 rule is true and I found Words was almost exactly what I personally want in a word processor, my only complaint being Words will import propriety document formats, but will not export to those same formats. This means when someone sends me a document in a proprietary format I can open and edit it, but can't send it back in the same format, which can cause compatibility issues.
Calligra Flow
The next stop on my whirlwind tour of Calligra was Flow, the suite's flowchart making application. When we first get started Flow looks a good deal like Words. Down the right side of the screen are formatting, preview and alignment tools. Over on the left we see a list of diagram categories. Here we can choose what sort of flowchart or diagram we wish to produce. Some options include logic flowcharts, electrical diagrams, optics and maps. Selecting a category expands it to show all the available shapes and, from there, it's a simple matter of dragging items onto our canvas. Components in the diagram can then be resized, text can be added and we can import images from files.
Personally, I typically read flowcharts more so than create them, but I found the whole process straight forward. Once we have our chart created we can save it in Open Document format, export it to a PDF file or or save it as an image file (most common image formats are supported). As with the Words application, I found Flow's interface was very flexible. Anything could be picked up and moved around the display, or turned off. Items could be made visible again from the program's Settings menu.
Calligra Flow 2.4 - creating a flowchart
(full image size: 143kB, screen resolution 1366x710 pixels)
Calligra Tables
The next application on my list was Tables, the Calligra spreadsheet program. When we start off Tables presents us with a blank sheet. At the top of the window we see the usual menu bar and thin toolbar with file, edit and format buttons. Over on the far right there is a toolbox which is mostly taken up with a cell editor. The cell editor allows us to input text or formulas. The editor also includes a button which will open a formula wizard that will walk us through getting values, running tests and inputting values into cells. I found it to be fairly straightforward and nicely laid out.
Like most other spreadsheet applications, Tables recognizes different types of data. This allows us to auto-fill in things like days of the week, patterns of numbers, names of months and other common pieces of information. Formulas use common function names, making Tables fairly compatible with other spreadsheet programs. And I found Tables would import spreadsheets in a variety of formats, including Open Document, Microsoft's Excel spreadsheets, comma separated value documents, Gnumeric documents and HTML formatted documents. We can also save our spreadsheets in a range of formats, though only open standards are supported, proprietary file formats are not.
Most of the time Tables worked well for me. It has a familiar interface and generally functioned the way I expected. However, a few times I ran into problems. Once, when editing a spreadsheet, I noticed the changes I was making to formulas and a column of numbers weren't being reflected on the page, as though Tables was waiting for a refresh command. This hadn't happened before and didn't happen again in later sessions. Another time I saved a spreadsheet in LibreOffice, opened it in Tables, made some changes and saved it again. Then I opened it again in LibreOffice to find the changes weren't recognized and the cells altered with Tables appeared scrambled. I'm not sure how much of that was the fault of LibreOffice and how much was a problem with Tables, but it did serve as a warning that documents transferred between the two suites may not be completely compatible.
As with its sibling, I came away from using Tables feeling much the same way as I had when using Words. It appears to be a light edition of a spreadsheet application, ideal for people who are tracking home expenses, or small businesses. We have the basics, lots of formulas, some support for scripts, multiple sheets and cell protection. On the other hand we don't appear to have the ability to add charts or use plugins and the goal seek functionality is quite simple.
Calligra Karbon14
Next up in my experiment was Karbon14, a vector drawing application. Karbon14 may have been, for me at any rate, the least intuitive of the programs I had used thus far. Like the others, we start out with a blank page and a toolbox down the right side of the screen. Over on the left is a small block of tools for drawing and manipulating pieces of the image. Some aspects of the application I picked up easily enough, such as dragging items from the tool box to the canvas and resizing them. Selecting and moving pieces around also seemed straightforward enough.
Where I tended to run into trouble was with colours. For instance, if I started drawing free-hand the "paint" would appear blue, even if I selected red or black before hand. Eventually I realized I needed to draw first and then pick the colour I wanted and my entire doodle would change to match. Likewise I had trouble getting gradients to show up the way I expected. Part of my issue seemed to stem from there being three different colour indicators on the screen: a colour bar at the bottom, a drop-down colour/pattern selector in the upper-right and a colour indicator in the bottom-right, each of which (at first) appeared to operate independently. Eventually I got the hang of things, but I never really came around to the Karbon14 approach to graphic editing.
Calligra Stage
Stage is Calligra's slide presentation program and it's an application with which I struggled without much success. At first glance it's set up much the same way as the other Calligra programs. The menu at the top and the toolbox down the right side were becoming familiar by this point. As with other presentation programs we can see thumbnail versions of our slides to the left of the window and we can drag text boxes, images and other items into the presentation. Where I ran into trouble was with managing items once I'd added them to a slide. For instance, I added a chart to a slide, then fumbled around for a while trying to figure out how to edit its properties.
Right-clicking on items only provides an option to delete them from the slide. When I found the proper editing tool I found I could change some aspects of the chart, such as whether it was a pie chart or bar graph, but I couldn't get the chart to show more than three data points at any given time. The calculation of how it decided the size of the bars (or pie slices) didn't seem to line up with the numbers I provided it either. Another problem I ran into was that some images and charts I was able to resize, others refused to scale or even move to a different location on the slide. At one point I tried to add table and it resulted in Stage immediately crashing.
With Stage I felt all the pieces were there, but getting them to produce the result I wanted was difficult.
Calligra Stage 2.4 - creating slides
(full image size: 283kB, screen resolution 1366x710 pixels)
Calligra Kexi
The last program I explored during my trial was Kexi, the Calligra database application. Kexi provided my shortest experience. When I opened Kexi it asked if I wanted to create a database on a server or create a new database in a local file. I selected local file and took the default file name. At which point Kexi said it had encountered an error and couldn't create a database. Any attempt to work with the application beyond that point resulted in it crashing. I checked and found Kexi was, in fact, creating a file of zero bytes in size, demonstrating write access wasn't an issue. The error message was generic, simply stating that the database could not be created. Additional attempts to use Kexi all ended the same way, thus my experiment with Kexi started and ended quickly.
Calligra Kexi 2.4 - attempting to create a database
(full image size: 89kB, screen resolution 1366x710 pixels)
Conclusions
Having used Calligra for a week and having tried to use it, as much as possible, for my day-to-day work I feel as though I've really just covered the top layer of what is available in the suite. With this number of applications to go through and so many features to explore I could really only get a taste of each program. Still, I was left with a strong first impression of each item in the suite. I found I very much enjoyed Words and Tables. This is probably because they're the applications I used the most as they fell into my usual work flow, but I also feel they were the most similar in design to their counterparts in other productivity suites. I especially liked that I could, once I set up my pages or spreadsheets the way I wanted them, turn off the toolbox and toolbar with a click and I'd have a distraction-free interface.
Other programs, such as Karbon14 (the drawing program) and Stage (the slide show application) didn't get as much use. And, perhaps because of that, or perhaps because of the nature of their controls, I didn't take to them. I found my work patterns did not line up with the way Karbon14 and Stage worked. Flow, the flowchart program, worked well enough for me. It isn't a program I would normally use, but I found it intuitive and, if I had to create flowcharts in the future, Flow would certainly be my go-to application. Kexi, obviously I can't really dissect, as I couldn't get it to create a database.
As I mentioned above, my over all sense of Calligra is that the developers are creating office software for the 90% of people who need 10% of the functions. This allows them to create light and pleasantly uncluttered applications. Some features may be missing and some existing features may work a bit differently than they do in other office suites, but the important thing is the core functionality is there. For people like me who, in a home setting at least, just want to type documents with the benefit of spell check and who use spreadsheets mostly for adding columns of numbers, Calligra does well. The only serious stumbling block I ran into was the inability to export documents in proprietary Microsoft formats, which have become very entrenched in the business world. This puts up a barrier for Calligra adoption as I could easily read incoming files, but if I wanted to edit them and send them back, I had to switch to a different productivity suite.
Another characteristic I found interesting is that all of the Calligra applications appear to be designed with wide screens in mind, that is the toolboxes are placed to the left and right while vertical screen space tends to be preserved by default. We can change this, moving tools to the top or bottom of the screen and we can turn them off and I very much enjoyed the flexibility.
All of this leaves me with the impression Calligra may be focused on the mobile/tablet market. With the ability to import most document formats (even if export isn't as feature complete), the flexible interface and the focus on a small, core set of features, it seems Calligra should be ideal for tablet users and people with netbooks. There were rough edges, at least in the late beta I used, but the basics are there and I think people who feel their office software is too cluttered or too heavy will appreciate the Calligra suite.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar) |
Ubuntu's Quantal Quetzal, interviews with Jane Silber, Jono Bacon and Artyom Zorin, whither Mandriva, upgrading to Fedora 17, Haiku overview
 Whatever your opinion about Canonical, Ubuntu and the project's current direction, you have to admit that these biannual releases provide so much excitement, talking points, analyses and opinions in every tech publication that it sometimes looks as if the Internet was all about Linux. That in itself can't be a bad thing. Last week's release of Ubuntu and all of its official derivatives created a new momentum - both for those who enjoy the Unity interface and all of its recent improvements, but also for those who prefer a more traditional desktop and who will impatiently wait for Linux Mint with its MATE or Cinnamon layers. Besides the release, last week also delivered the long-awaited code name for Ubuntu 12.10, which will be called Quantal Quetzal: "And so the stage is set for a decision: I give you the Quantal Quetzal, soon to be dressed in tessellated technicolour, now open for toolchains, kernels and other pressing preparatory packages." The development of Quantal will resemble that of Precise; there will be three alpha releases (the first of which will appear on 7 June), two beta builds and a final release on 18 October 2012. For a full roadmap please refer to the Quantal Quetzal release schedule.
Still on the subject of Ubuntu, we would like to link to two interesting interviews that are worth reading if you enjoy the distribution. The first one is with Canonical CEO Jane Silber as published by the Linux User magazine: "There are challenges when we sometimes want to do things for commercial reasons and we can't reveal it as early as the community would like. There are challenges around the fact that most enterprises would actually like some non-free software in there. We have made an exception for hardware enablement and drivers, but we have made a commitment that the applications must be free." The second interview is with Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, brought to you by the Unixmen website: "Ubuntu 12.04 is definitely a key milestone, and I believe it will be one of the most important releases in Ubuntu's history. A few years back we made some changes that in my mind culturally changed Ubuntu from more of a 'project' (collection of parts that fit together) to a 'product' (building something that serves user experiences and problems). Ubuntu 12.04 has a quite considerable amount of design thinking involved which is a result of user testing, feedback and more. I think the result is a more integrated, consistent experience."
* * * * *
 Of the many Ubuntu derivatives that attempt to "improve" on their parent by providing a more novice-friendly desktop environment for new Linux converts, Zorin OS stands out for its careful balance of community and business orientation - by promoting a free edition in the hope that users will eventually switch to the "Premium" edition (which includes technical support) or buy a Zorin OS PC. Project founder Artyom Zorin explains many of the distro's concepts in this interview with DarkDuck: "The killer feature of Zorin OS is definitely its ease to use and familiar interface. By default Zorin OS has a Windows 7-like GUI, as Windows 7 users are our biggest target audience. However we didn't want to leave other OS users out in the cold, so we catered for them by creating our unique Zorin Look Changer program which allows users to switch their desktop interface to look like Windows 7, XP and GNOME 2 as well as Windows Vista, Windows 2000 and Mac OS X in the Premium editions. We also include more of our own programs such as Zorin Browser Manager, Zorin Background Plus and Zorin Splash Screen Manager to make the customization of your system quick and easy. Another substantial feature of Zorin OS is that it's an out-of-the-box software solution. Even the Core version of Zorin OS includes all of the essential software that users want and need such as the LibreOffice suite, a video editor, as well as all the media codecs."
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 Mandriva Linux, once the most popular distribution in DistroWatch's page hit ranking statistics, has fallen out of the top 20 list for the first time ever. The negative publicity following another round of financial troubles last year combined with lack of concrete announcements about the project's status together with continued absence of any release schedule has resulted in many of Mandriva users switching to Mageia and possibly ROSA. Linux Weekly News' Jake Edge takes a look at the current status of the company and distribution in "Whither Mandriva?": "It would seem that progress on the distribution has stalled. Some developers have moved to ROSA, which is a Russia-based company that is building a desktop distribution (ROSA Marathon 2012) atop Mandriva. For a while, it seems, ROSA was working within the Mandriva community but has more recently moved on. Much of that information comes from a thread on the Mandriva Cooker mailing list. That thread was started by long-time Mandriva developer Per Øyvind Karlsen . Karlsen is concerned that the Mandriva distribution is dying because the parent company has financial problems and because there has never been a neutral foundation set up to shepherd the distribution."
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 The recent arrival of Fedora 17 beta means that we are one step closer to the final release, currently scheduled for May 22nd. This is also the time when the developers rely on public testing more than ever. If you feel adventurous or wish to help with final debugging, there is a relatively easy way to upgrade your Fedora 16 installation to the current post-beta of Fedora 17. Harish Pillay explains the steps in "Fedora 17 before it is released": "I decided to take the plunge and run Fedora 17 before it's officially launched in May. My system has been running Fedora 16 x86_64 since the launch last November and I must say that it has been solid - including the GNOME 3.x stuff. When it finally completed the pre-upgrade, I rebooted the machine, then it went through the final install and, voilà, all was good. The key apps I need to use on a daily basis - mutt, msmtp, Firefox, Chromium, XChat, Thunderbird, VLC, Twinkle, Calibre, virt-manager all worked as before. The only exception is VLC which will play OGG and MP3 but fails to play FLV and MP4 (complains that it needs h264 codecs)." If you do decide to take the plunge, heed the advice given in the first comment following the above-mentioned post and read this post-upgraded clean-up tutorial.
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 Finally, a link to an excellent article about Haiku, an open-source operating system inspired by the much-loved BeOS. Written by Ryan Leavengood for IEEE Spectrum, the story is entitled "The Dawn of Haiku OS": "It was the summer of 2001, and computer programmer Michael Phipps had a problem: His favorite operating system, BeOS, was about to go extinct. Having an emotional attachment to a piece of software may strike you as odd, but to Phipps and many others (including me), BeOS deserved it. It ran amazingly fast on the hardware of its day; it had a clean, intuitive user interface; and it offered a rich, fun, and modern programming environment. In short, we found it vastly superior to every other computer operating system available. But the company that had created BeOS couldn't cut it in the marketplace, and its assets, including BeOS, were being sold to a competitor. Worried that under a new owner BeOS would die a slow, unsupported death, Phipps did the only logical thing he could think of: He decided to re-create BeOS completely from scratch, but as open-source code. An open-source system, he reasoned, isn't owned by any one company or person, and so it can't disappear just because a business goes belly-up or key developers leave."
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Using native applications, a note on OpenSSH
Mixing-and-matching asks: Is there any advantage to using, say, KDE applications in LXDE or Xfce to speed up responsiveness of the desktop environment?
DistroWatch answers: You will probably notice a few benefits to running KDE applications in LXDE or Xfce compared to running KDE/Qt applications under the KDE desktop. Both LXDE and Xfce will probably load faster when you login, but the big difference will be the amount of memory used. KDE is heavier than both Xfce and LXDE and so you may find some tasks are slower under KDE than the other environments, especially if your machine does not have much RAM. If you're using applications which require a lot of memory or if you're running several programs at once your machine will be less likely to need to swap out RAM when running the smaller desktops. In the past, when running low-specification equipment, I found I was often using KDE for day-to-day tasks and for work, but I'd switch over to Xfce to run games because they'd run faster and I'd get smoother graphic performance under Xfce. However, the more resources you have available on your computer the less of a difference in performance you're likely to see between one desktop and another since memory and CPU cycles become less in demand.
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An additional note on OpenSSH. A few weeks ago we looked at using OpenSSH keys to allow remote logins without requiring a password. And we touched briefly on transferring keys to remote servers. Someone raised an interesting point after that column wondering if there was any way to script OpenSSH connections without keys, or a way to transfer security keys to many remote computers (such as in a computer lab) without having to babysit the process and type in passwords. On the surface it would probably seem like this would be easy, there should be a way to hand a password to the SSH client or pipe a password from a file to OpenSSH. However, such is not the case, OpenSSH seems to go out of its way to prevent accepting a password from anywhere except the user's keyboard for security reasons. This means there's no password parameter, no shell variable that can be used to hold a password and piping a password doesn't work. If you look around you can find hundreds of forums featuring the same question, wondering how to automate uploading public keys or script logins where keys haven't been set up.
There are solutions, I've found two which work fairly well. The first is to use the expect software to intercept the password request and send back a response. The expect software can be found in the repositories of most Linux distributions and a script to connect to a remote server using OpenSSH might look like the following:
#!/usr/bin/expect
spawn ssh user@yourserver.com
expect "password:"
send "put-your-password-here\n";
interact
It's not particularly secure to have one's password sitting in a script, but if we need to connect to a remote machine without manually typing a password and without keys in place, this will do it. Another, slightly simpler, approach is to use Sshpass. The Sshpass program accepts either a password or the location of a password and hands that over to OpenSSH. Sshpass is fairly flexible in that it can accept a password on the command line or via a shell variable or from a file. In the following example, we save our password in a shell variable and then open a secure shell session:
export SSHPASS=my-password-goes-here
sshpass -e ssh user@remote-server.com
In this next example we transfer our public security key to a remote server, using our password on the command line:
sshpass -pmy-password-goes-here ssh-copy-id remote-server.com
Having shared these utilities, I feel it's also important to point out OpenSSH doesn't include these features because they are a security risk. Whenever a password is stored in plain text, whether it's in a shell variable or on the command line or in a file, it's possible someone will see it. And the more often this technique is used, the more likely it is for someone to discover the password. When at all possible it's recommended people make use of security keys and interactive logins. Expect and Sshpass should only be used sparingly, if at all.
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| Released Last Week |
Scientific Linux 5.8
Pat Riehecky has announced the release of Scientific Linux 5.8, a distribution rebuilt from source packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 and enhanced with extra software and tools useful in academic environments: "We would like to announce the immediate availability of Scientific Linux 5.8." Besides upstream updates some of the changes compared to version 5.7 include: "Intel wireless firmware (ucode) updated to a more current version; Java updated to the latest security package; the 1.4.14 release of OpenAFS, this version fixes a minor locking bug; Ralink wireless firmware updated to a more current version; yum-utils updated to current version; lsb_release -a now reports the same as SL6...." Read the release announcement and release notes for further details.
Linux Mint 201204 "Debian"
Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 201204 "Debian" edition: "The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 201204. This release features three of the best Linux desktops available at the moment: The traditional and functional MATE 1.2 desktop, the innovative and beautiful Cinnamon 1.4 and the lightweight and rock-solid Xfce 4.8. Both the MATE/Cinnamon and Xfce editions use the MDM display manager. MDM will look familiar to many people, as it brings back GDM 2.20 and all its features: Remote login, configuration tools, fast-user switching, theme-ability, language selection. Yahoo joins DuckDuckGo and is featured as default in the list of search engines which financially support Linux Mint." Here is the full release announcement with screenshots of the three desktop options.
Tiny Core Linux 4.5, 4.5.1
Robert Shingledecker has announced the release of Tiny Core Linux 4.5, a fast and minimalist Linux distribution for desktop use: "Team Tiny Core is proud to announce the release of Core 4.5. Change log: updated wbar to 2.3.0; Updated wbar.sh, wbar_setup and wbarconf GUI for new wbar changes; new Apps GUI replaces AppBrowser and AppsAudit; updated Apps GUI OnBoot, OnDemand and Md5Check to case-insensitive sort order; updated Apps GUI OnDemand to support ondemand noicons; updated App GUI to add descriptive title and moved URI to bottom; renamed ScmBrowser to ScmApps, added delete and descriptive title, moved URI to bottom, adjusted menu; updated tce-audit to suppress spurious messages with regard to FAT file systems; updated tce-setup added support for scm in cde tmp/builtin for remasters; updated scm-load to forward md5check results to calling GUI; updated scm-load to support scm only type systems and remasters...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a complete technical changelog.
Dragora GNU/Linux 2.2
Matias Fonzo has announced the release of Dragora GNU/Linux 2.2, a "libre" distribution built from scratch and featuring Xfce as the default desktop: "I am pleased to announce the release of Dragora GNU/Linux 2.2 (code name 'rafaela'). Dragora is a powerful and reliable GNU/Linux distribution created from scratch with the intention of providing a stable, multi-platform and multi-purpose operating system. Built with 100% free software. The development focused on stability, correction of bugs, upgrades and security updates. The improvements have occurred in the system installer, the package system, and in Runit's scheme, our init system. This version is available for the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, along with a second CD called "plus" which contains Emacs 23.4, Gnash 0.8.10, Gtk-Gnutella 0.97, and wxWidgets 2.9.1 with their corresponding sources." See the full release announcement for a long list of highlights and new features.
Dragora GNU/Linux 2.2 - a "libre" distribution built from scratch
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ClearOS 6.2 "Community"
Peter Baldwin has announced the release of ClearOS 6.2, a distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 and designed for small business servers and gateways: "ClearOS Community 6 has arrived. A lot of time, resources and development have gone into making ClearOS the best next generation small business server and gateway. The underlying framework was redesigned to make it easy to create new and innovative applications. The new Marketplace now provides a quick way to install both open-source and paid applications. There's also 64-bit support, a shiny new graphical installer, improved usability, better VM support, a modernized build system, and the migration to the latest upstream 6.x version. We stepped back, improved the architecture and software, and are now ready to bring you a slew of new applications in 2012." Here is the full release announcement.
Swift Linux 0.2.0
Jason Hsu has announced the release of Swift Linux 0.2.0, a lightweight desktop distribution with IceWM - now based on Linux Mint's "Debian" edition: "Welcome to the new Mint-based Swift Linux. Version 0.2.0 of Swift Linux is now available. Swift Linux is now based on Linux Mint 'Debian' edition but retains the spirit of antiX Linux. The new Minty base improves hardware and codec support and continues to provide Swift Linux a software repository consisting of over 30,000 packages. However, Swift Linux is keeping the IceWM and ROX pinboard desktop environment to provide user-friendliness without bloat. Also, the Swift Linux ISO image is still small enough to fit onto a CD. Subsequent versions of Swift Linux will be provided frequently (usually no more than a few weeks between editions) but with only modest improvements with each iteration." Visit the project's home page to read the brief release announcement.
Swift Linux 0.2.0 - a lightweight distro based on Linux Mint "Debian"
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BackBox Linux 2.05
Raffaele Forte has announced the release of BackBox Linux 2.05, an updated version of the project's Ubuntu-based distribution designed to perform penetration tests and security assessments: "The BackBox team is proud to announce the release 2.05 of BackBox Linux. The new release includes features such as Ubuntu 11.04, Linux kernel 2.6.38 and Xfce 4.8.0. What's new: system upgrade; bug corrections; performance boost; improved start menu; improved WiFi driver (compat-wireless aircrack patched); new hacking tools - Creepy, fern-wifi-cracker, Joomscan, Pyrit, Reaver, Xplico; updated tools - Crunch, Fimap, Hydra, MagicTree, Metasploit... System requirements: 32-bit or 64-bit processor; 256 MB of system memory (RAM); 4.4 GB of disk space for installation; graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution; DVD-ROM drive or USB port." Here is the brief release announcement.
Ubuntu 12.04
Ubuntu 12.04, the latest version of Canonical's flagship operating system featuring the Unity user interface and Head-Up Display menu system, has been released: "The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long-Term Support). Code-named 'Precise Pangolin', 12.04 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing a few new features and improving quality control. For PC users, Ubuntu 12.04 supports laptops, desktops, and netbooks with a unified look and feel based on an updated version of the desktop shell called 'Unity', which introduces 'Head-Up Display' search capabilities." Read the release announcement and see the features page for more details.
Kubuntu 12.04
Kubuntu 12.04, a new version of an Ubuntu variant featuring the KDE 4.8.2 desktop, is out: "The Kubuntu community is proud to announce the release of 12.04 LTS, the 'Precise Pangolin': the new Long-Term Support version of our friendly operating system. Built on Ubuntu's core and polished with KDE's applications and workspaces, Kubuntu 12.04 LTS is a grand example of friendly, fast and beautiful software. We recommend it as the perfect OS for casual users, students, Linux gamers, software developers, professionals, and anyone interested in a free, open platform that is both beautiful and useful. Highlights: KDE 4.8.2; Amarok 2.5; Rekonq and OwnCloud updates; Calligra suite...." See the release announcement and release notes for more information and screenshots.
Kubuntu 12.04 - an Ubuntu flavour with the latest KDE desktop
(full image size: 1,216kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Edubuntu 12.04
Edubuntu 12.04, a new release of the specialist Ubuntu remix designed for schools, is ready for download: "After six months of preparation, it's with great pride that the Edubuntu development team announces today the release of Edubuntu 12.04 LTS. As the first Long-Term Support release of the Edubuntu project, this version will be supported for 5 years (April 2017). The Edubuntu development team will also provide 'point releases' in sync with Ubuntu's to offer new installation media containing all the latest bug fixes. What's new? iTalc was replaced by Epoptes, a new classroom management software; new major version of LTSP (5.3.x) including numerous bug fixes and speed improvement; fully translatable installation and post-installation environment...." Read the release announcement and release notes for further details.
Edubuntu 12.04 - an Ubuntu tailored to schools
(full image size: 1,516kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Mythbuntu 12.04
Mythbuntu 12.04, a new update of the specialist Ubuntu sub-project with a focus on setting up a standalone MythTV system, is available: "Mythbuntu 12.04 has been released. It is very important to note that this release is only compatible with MythTV 0.25 systems. The MythTV component of previous Mythbuntu releases can be upgraded to a compatible MythTV version by using the Mythbuntu repositories. Highlights: MythTV 0.25; starting with 12.04, the Mythbuntu team will only be doing LTS releases; enable MythTV and Mythbuntu Updates repositories directly from the Mythbuntu Control Centre without needing to install the mythbuntu-repos package; Mythbuntu theme fixes." Here is the release announcement with links to relevant topics.
Xubuntu 12.04
Xubuntu 12.04, a brand-new version of the popular Ubuntu flavour featuring the Xfce 4.8 desktop, has been released: "The Xubuntu team is very proud and happy to announce the release of Xubuntu 12.04, code-named 'Precise Pangolin'. Xubuntu 12.04 is a Long-Term Support release (LTS) and will be supported for three years per the Xubuntu LTS plan. Release notes: the i386 images use a non-PAE kernel, the non-PAE kernel will not be available in future Xubuntu releases; some default shortcuts have been changed, added and deleted; pavucontrol is used instead of xfce4-mixer due to latter not supporting PulseAudio; the Alacarte menu editor is installed by default and will work with Xfce-related menu items as well; lots of appearance improvements, including new branding...." Read the release announcement and release notes for additional details.
Xubuntu 12.04 - an Ubuntu variant with Xfce 4.8
(full image size: 438kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Lubuntu 12.04
Lubuntu 12.04, an updated version of the official Ubuntu sub-project showcasing the lightweight LXDE desktop, has been released: "Lubuntu 12.04 'Precise Pangolin' is finally here. Features: based on the lightweight LXDE desktop environment; PCManFM 0.9.10, a fast and lightweight file manager using GIO/GVFS; Openbox, the fast and extensible, default windows-manager of LXDE; LightDM, using the simple GTK+ greeter; Chromium, the open-source variant of Google Chrome; based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Improvements since Lubuntu 11.10: a new software center, optimized to be lightweight, for easy installation and removal of applications from your system; new theme; Blueman is now used for managing Bluetooth devices." See the release announcement and release notes to learn more.
Lubuntu 12.04 - a lightweight Ubuntu system with LXDE
(full image size: 269kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Ubuntu Studio 12.04
Ubuntu Studio 12.04, the latest release from a project providing a large collection of audio, video and graphics software in one compact package, is ready: "Ubuntu Studio is the Ubuntu flavour designed for content creation. It's produced as a DVD image that can also be converted to an USB stick and includes support for most languages by default. Ubuntu Studio 12.04 LTS is a 3 year long-term support release and will be supported until April 2015. New features include: live DVD; GUI-based installation; low-latency kernel installed by default; i386 images use the low-latency PAE kernel; Xfce as the default desktop environment; Pulse Audio with JACK bridging enabled by default; new theme, icons and default font...." Read the detailed release notes for more information.
Ubuntu Studio 12.04 - a specialist Ubuntu for media creation
(full image size: 1,330kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)
Ubuntu Rescue Remix 12.04
Andrew Zajac has announced the release of Ubuntu Rescue Remix 12.04, an Ubuntu-based data recovery software toolkit: "Version 12.04 'Precise Pangolin' of the very best free and libre open-source data recovery software toolkit based on Ubuntu is out. Ubuntu Rescue Remix provides a robust yet lean system for data recovery and forensics. No graphical interface is used; the live system can boot and function normally on machines with very little memory or processor power. Following Ubuntu's six-month release schedule, all the software is up-to-date, stable and supported. Ubuntu Rescue Remix features a full command-line environment with the newest versions of the most powerful free and libre open-source data recovery software including GNU ddrescue, Photorec, The Sleuth Kit, Gnu-fdisk and ClamAV. This release features ddrutility, a new tool written by Scott Dwyer to identify files affected by unrecoverable blocks on a disk image." Here is the brief release announcement.
Proxmox 2.1 "Virtual Environment"
Martin Maurer has announced the release of Proxmox 2.1 "Virtual Environment" edition, an open-source virtualization platform for running virtual appliances and virtual machines, based on Debian GNU/Linux: "We just released Proxmox VE 2.1, including a lot of bug fixes in the new virtual machine startup and shutdown behavior. Release notes: simplified GUI for users without permissions; implemented startup and shutdown ordering; improved task logs on node start-up and shut-down; added Russian, Italian and Turkish translations; updated Corosync cluster stack to version 1.4.3; updated LVM to version 2.02.95 (fixes snapshot problems); bug fixes." Read the rest of the release announcement for upgrade instructions and other useful links.
Tails 0.11
Tails 0.11, a new version of the Debian-based live DVD designed for anonymous Internet surfing, has been released: "Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System), version 0.11, is out. All users must upgrade as soon as possible. Notable user-visible changes include: Tails Greeter, the login screen which obsoletes the language selection boot menu, Tails Greeter also adds some new options - activating persistence and setting a sudo password; Tails USB installer, this graphical user interface mostly obsoletes our old instructions of 'cat-ing' the ISO directly onto a block device; persistence can optionally be used when running Tails from a USB drive, application configurations and arbitrary directories can be made persistent; Iceweasel 10.0.4esr with search plugins, replaced Debian-provided DuckDuckGo search plugin with the "HTML SSL" one...." Read the rest of the release announcement for a complete list of changes.
* * * * *
Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| DistroWatch.com News |
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New distributions added to waiting list
* * * * *
DistroWatch database summary
* * * * *
This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 7 May 2012. To contact the authors please send email to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, suggestions and corrections: news, donations, distribution submissions, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (feedback and suggestions: podcast edition)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Great Issue (by The Bulldog on 2012-04-30 07:39:15 GMT from United States)
Enjoyed the review on Calligra. Thanks Jesse. ZorinOS is one of my Linux favs, so it was nice to see it referenced under Miscellaneous News. Looks like a lot of new releases, so I better get to downloading and checking these new releases out.
2 • Calligra and Microsoft formats (by Joan on 2012-04-30 09:45:30 GMT from Germany)
"The only serious stumbling block I ran into was the inability to export documents in proprietary Microsoft formats." I have the same issue. It would be my favorite office suite but I have no use for it without this capability.
3 • Any (by devnull on 2012-04-30 11:20:51 GMT from Israel)
Re 'export SSHPASS': other users' processes are usually able to read your processes' environment, so don't use that approach on a shared machine.
4 • Calligra Words image issue. (by Antony on 2012-04-30 11:52:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
Jesse, re: your image issue. It seems that the Add Shapes was not displayed. Settings>Docker to enable.
Strange, as displayed by default here.
5 • Calligra who? OpenOffice is back (by Mark on 2012-04-30 13:01:48 GMT from Italy)
LibreOffice should not be scared of Calligra, but of OpenOffice 3.4, coming next week. I tested the release candidate and I found it rock-solid, solving also many LibreOffice bugs and focusing on the important features instead of adding stubs of features like LibreOffice is doing recently.
6 • Calligra (by Smellyman on 2012-04-30 13:33:08 GMT from Hong Kong)
Calligra seems great and actually Koffice seemed better than open office back in the day.
When you include Krita in it, it is one powerful suite. Features will continue pouring in as this is a complete re-write. It is an impressive under taking
7 • LibreOffice scared of OpenOffice? (by DavidEF on 2012-04-30 13:37:30 GMT from United States)
@5 Mark,
I don't know why LibreOffice should be scared of OpenOffice.org improving. Can you explain to me why it would be a bad thing for LibreOffice in particular? This is still open source software, is it not? The LibreOffice devs can still make any improvements they deem worthy/necessary for their users, can they not? After all, we're not talking about Mac vs PC here.
As for Calligra, I won't expect many LibreOffice users to consider it. I personally have to be able to export several formats, including proprietary. In fact, I use LibreOffice Portable at work to convert *.docx files to *.doc format on occasion.
8 • Calligra/Office software (by Wine Curmudgeon on 2012-04-30 13:38:47 GMT from United States)
Another great review, and you are exactly correct. All most of us need is a word processor and spreadsheet that loads quickly, is compatible with Word/Excel, and is easy to use.
9 • Calligra and no Proprietary formats! (by LuxPro on 2012-04-30 13:45:01 GMT from India)
Cheers to the Calligra team for what I might call their gumption to go with this idea! If you noticed it, the imports from MSO would not be clean in either OpenOffice or LibreOffice - it is MS's deliberate practice to keep something out so the FOSS devs continue running around the MS bush.
Now Calligra says "enough is enough." I don't care for you, if you won't care for interoperability. The MS jokers would not even have an export to PDF and would only read ODF in read only mode.
A tit for tat is what we need to offer.
Cheers Calligra!
10 • Calligra vs LibreOffice (by NN on 2012-04-30 13:50:15 GMT from United States)
I remember when first KDE Office came out. It is very long time but I did use StarrOffice as many others. Now KOffice split to Calligra and Koffice but I am using LibreOffice because is easy to covert MS Office files. Someone suggested me to use LibreOffice to covert MS doc to odf file and than use Calligra :).
IMO Calligra/KOffice are still not mature to use for the work. I am just sad because Krita is not a standalone application.
11 • mythbuntu vs. ubuntu TV (by nate on 2012-04-30 14:08:31 GMT from United States)
Does anyone know how the mythbuntu and ubuntu TV projects are going to interoperate? Mythbuntu is designed for media centers, but canological seems like they want to keep the TV version as close to the mainline as possible. Could someone please research this and report back?
12 • Calligra/Kexi (by octathlon on 2012-04-30 14:13:35 GMT from United States)
I'm disappointed to hear your experience with Kexi, as I had been hoping it would improve since I heard about Calligra. We use Access at work for several databases and what I like about it is the ease and speed of creating nice forms and reports. I still haven't found anything to compete with that for Linux (which I use exclusively at home). The database module of Libre/Open Office is useless.
13 • Calligra could be just what is needed. (by Eddie on 2012-04-30 14:40:15 GMT from United States)
I would love to have a lightweight office suite on my laptop and Calligra may just fit the bill. While Libreoffice is very good it is a little large and heavy for what I need on my laptop. Thanks for a great review.
It's sad to see what has happened to Mandriva and it can only be contributed to improper management. That's just my opinion tho.
Just a quick question, in your opinion which is the best desktop environment, LXDE, or Xfce?
14 • I think k^Hcalligra plan is a differentiator (by Marco on 2012-04-30 14:44:29 GMT from United States)
I do not think LO / OO has an equivalent to:
http://www.calligra.org/plan/
15 • Ubuntu (by Ricky on 2012-04-30 14:50:25 GMT from United Kingdom)
I haven't touched ubuntu since around 8.10, however i went and gave it another chance to see how the unity desktop was getting on... installed it fine, and upon rebooting i was presented with "input signal out of range" on my monitor, and could not even switch to a tty console (had the same message). This was a first for me... anyway i booted up a livecd and installed the nvidia driver from a chroot, and got it loaded up, after logging in i had to wait literally around 15minutes for the unity desktop to load up... terribly slow, the mouse floats in the opposite direction of the window you are moving and it's hardly usable. I don't see how they can call this a stable release... especially being an LTS... oh and also, the shutdown dialog doesn't work (you need to run sudo poweroff everytime).
It's not just this, random programs would simply crash or hang up, totem, firefox, momentary screen freezes, disk read/writes where twice as slow... what have they done to ubuntu lol? I'm pretty sure my download was fine (integrity check) and installed correctly. Besides i have had no problems using the same video driver/kernel on other distros...
Ended up going straight back to archlinux. Cannot waste my time with something that takes too much hassle to get it working properly. I know it's free... but for a product from canonical with a huge backing of manpower etc, we should be expecting quality tested releases.
16 • Ubuntu 8.10 vs. 12.04 (by Jason Hsu on 2012-04-30 15:10:05 GMT from United States)
Ricky, what are the specs of your computer? If you're using the same computer and haven't upgraded the RAM substantially, Ubuntu 12.04 will be MUCH slower than 8.10. Ubuntu is bloatware and has done something that was inconceivable just a few short years ago - it has caught up to Windows in the bloatware department.
17 • LMDE 201204 was a bust (by FalloutGuy on 2012-04-30 15:30:00 GMT from United States)
I had nothing but issues with this release. All prior releases was great. Was going to post about it, but I seen someone else had the same issues as me. So I just watched the thread and very few people had any advice and the devs, who granted are busy, never replied in the forum post.
Although Clem did edit the poster's comments on their blog and chalked it up to cosmetic issues, which in the poster's case and mine was false. A couple others were trying to be helpful, but it seemed they were in the dark as much as the poster and myself.
It seems to me that the once most helpful community, has turned to being just like other distro communities. Unhelpful or uncaring. Either way, I will no longer be using LMDE not any Mint releases. At least until they get their stuff together and start helping properly once again.
I would use Ubuntu 12.04, but the kernel they are using will not load on my system. All I get is a blinking cursor and the system never loads.
18 • @16 Jason Hsu (by DavidEF on 2012-04-30 15:47:44 GMT from United States)
Again with the hateful and baseless commentary? Yes, in some peoples' eyes, Ubuntu is bloatware, but not any moreso than every other major linux distro. And no, Ubuntu has still not "caught up to Windows in the bloatware department." That really is a hard thing to do, and I don't know of ANY linux distro that has done it yet.
Even Windows XP SP3 cannot fit into 8GB of hard disk space, or operate smoothly with less than 1.5GB of RAM, in my experience. Your Mileage May Vary. On my laptop, the factory fresh install of Vista was >15GB of hard disk space, and the Recovery Partition was a 15GB partition, of which >10GB was used. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB just to make it tolerable to use until I wiped it to install Ubuntu. Windows 7 took a major step down in resource usage on a clean install, to everyone's delight, but still requires more than any linux distro I know of, in my experience. Again, YMMV.
Please also remember that Ubuntu, and other major linux distros, include dozens of applications ready to use. Windows does not. To some, the applications themselves may be the bloatware. If that is you, then remember once again that one man's trash is another man's treasure. In the case of applications software, one man's bloat is another man's killer app. You may be appalled to learn that I install GB's worth of extra stuff after every clean install, because there is even more functionality that I like to have, that most people won't need. I don't feel a bit bloated while using my desktop at home, or my laptop.
It's okay to have opinions. I have mine, and you have yours. But, please explain to me why so many people have nothing but hateful things to say lately? Can't we have an intelligent conversation without stooping to such low levels?
19 • Adding images in Calligra Words (by Valerio Mariani on 2012-04-30 16:05:19 GMT from Switzerland)
> For example, there doesn't appear to be any obvious way to add images into a
> document.
On my machine, in Calligra Words, is: Add Shape, image, drag and drop on the document. A file dialog opens and lets you choose the image.
Not very intuitive, I have to say. But come on, I found it in five minutes...
20 • LMDE's comments from Fallout Guy (by tyhee88 on 2012-04-30 16:07:31 GMT from Canada)
I haven't tried the latest LMDE, nor do I expect to.
The Mint developers have spent a good deal of time on alternatives to Gnome 3. It has consumed a great deal of time, so much so that LMDE, which relies on service packs rather than going by the Debian Testing repositories as used to be the case, went half a year without an update pack. The update pack, when it arrived last month, was some 700 MB in size.
The Mint developers can focus on what they wish-that is their right and I have no complaints. However, I'm not about to use a distro that is given such little attention from its developers.
Unfortunately for those of us that like XFCE, the old Mint XFCE is gone, replaced by an XFCE version of Mint Debian-which is clearly not a priority for the Mint developers.
The KDE and LXDE versions of Mint are probably still worthwhile, as is, of course, the main edition for those happy with Mate or Cinnamon.
I still use Mint 9 but, after support for it ends it's likely I'll go the way of Fallout Guy and use alternatives for a time.
21 • @14 Calligra Plan (by DavidEF on 2012-04-30 16:19:49 GMT from United States)
Marco,
You may be right. I don't remember seeing or hearing of anything like Plan in OO.o or LO ever. It may make Calligra worth considering for people who might find Plan useful. Since I've never heard of it before, all I can go on is what the webpage says about it. I can see it being very useful to contractors managing resources on a job that may have special considerations. Being able to dynamically change the schedule and see what affect those changes have can mean the difference between success/failure or profit/loss for the project. I could go on and say that any company that doesn't already have a resource scheduling system of some kind might benefit from adding Plan to their administration.
22 • @18 (bloat vs. light) (by Microlinux on 2012-04-30 16:33:17 GMT from France)
Just for the record: Debian Squeeze with KDE4 on my Panasonic Toughbook consumes 109 MB RAM (!) when the desktop is loaded, and runs fine with a total of 512 MB RAM. Ubuntu (11.04, 11.10, 12.04) will simply freeze that same hardware. That's a simple fact.
23 • @22 Agreed! (by DavidEF on 2012-04-30 16:47:14 GMT from United States)
You're absolutely right. I've not seen Ubuntu run on that low RAM in years!
I once had Puppy 3.x running on an old 5x86 with 16MB RAM. There is a balance between "light" and "usable" that will be different from person to person. I like ultralight distros. I just don't find them very usable for my purposes. YMMV is inevitably an understatement in a place such as this (DWW comments section.)
24 • LMDE (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-04-30 16:48:50 GMT from United States)
RE: #20, @tyhee88:
I was running LMDE 201109 on my notebook before I switched to Xubuntu. I switched to Xubuntu because upgrade pack 4 for LMDE blew up in my face and hosed my install.
While LMDE is nice, once it's running properly- and I appreciate all the work the dev's have put into it, it's just too unstable. Xubuntu just works better.
I was really hoping that Mint 13 was going to be XFCE.
I'm not crazy about Mate and Cinnamon. Not thrilled with LXDE either. The closest thing to Gnome 2 for me is XFCE.
I still use Mint 11 on my other notebook, but support ends in October for that release. So it will probably be Xubuntu on that one as well when the time comes.
25 • For the curious - System Requirements for Ubuntu (by DavidEF on 2012-04-30 17:00:59 GMT from United States)
From the Ubuntu website:
"The minimum memory requirement for Ubuntu 12.04 is 384 MB of memory for Ubuntu Desktop."
and Kubuntu (KDE4):
"The minimum memory requirement for Kubuntu 12.04 is 384 MB of memory for Kubuntu."
26 • Xubuntu and Ambiance (by Gustavo on 2012-04-30 17:08:35 GMT from Brazil)
https://plus.google.com/photos/108459158828647788472/albums/5736812369300888721
This is what Xubuntu looks with Ambiance theme from Ubuntu 12.04. The theme and wallpaper are available from ubuntu-artwork package from regular (x)ubuntu repository.
27 • @15 • Ubuntu (by mandog on 2012-04-30 17:26:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
The Nouveau display driver is not removed when you install Nvidia, in the latest Ubuntu, you need to uninstall it manually and check you have a xorg file with the correct details in your etc/ X11 folder, Then blacklist Nouveau in your etc/modprobe.d folder, Ubuntu has made it hard to install Nvidia drivers to support the purpul/pink boot screen, Nvidia no longer boots with the kernel but from program autostart when you login. This seems to have started with Beta2.
Yes Ubuntu uses as much RAM as win7 735mb after boot on my 64bt system, In comparison Arch 64bt uses around half the amount. Also there is a bug in the live CD installer, causing it not to configure correctly for some people I was one of them.
28 • @15 Unity & NVIDIA cards (by DiveEd on 2012-04-30 17:43:47 GMT from United States)
Ricky,
I had the same problem when I tried to test Unity. There seems to be a problem with some NVIDIA cards and an OpenGL setting. If you open the NVIDIA Xserver Settings program, under OpenGL settings, uncheck the Allow Flipping box your problems should go away. Not sure if it is worth the effort, I quickly got tired of trying to work with Unity and started testing the fallback desktop.
29 • The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) (by Slo Bill on 2012-04-30 17:51:29 GMT from United States)
I like what TAILS is up to.
It is an interisting and usefull live distro.
30 • @19 (by Antony on 2012-04-30 18:03:44 GMT from United Kingdom)
As I pointed out in post 4 (though not very well as I was a bit rushed), looking at Jesse's screen-shot the Add Shapes dialogue is missing from the dock area to the right of the screen.
31 • @16 (by Ricky on 2012-04-30 18:52:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
Jason, i have a fairly decent computer (3 years old), 2.8GB ram, amd athlon64 dual core 2.6Ghz, nvidia 6150se graphics (not too good for gaming, but it works).
It is besides the point however, as i have been able to run the last stable release of GNOME2 with compiz on full graphical settings/effects with no problem. This computer can also run KDE 4.8.2 with all graphical effects enabled without a problem aswell. Pretty much any "bloated" distro has been able to run fine, with the exception of GNOME shell and Unity desktops... which is odd because as i said compiz runs fine standalone or w/ GNOME2, unity pretty much is compiz, but it is a disaster in terms of being "usable".
Even under archlinux i'm able to watch a DVD, compile a kernel, listen to music at the same time without swapping to disk. Ubuntu just doesn't make sense to me anymore, more problems than it is worth. 2.8GB ram might not sound alot, but i never use anything more than 2GB, un-used ram is wasted ram =P
Even in 12.04 of ubuntu, it would use about 1400MB ram just to run the desktop and browser, but the speed of it was unbearable where the windows end up floating away from the mouse after releasing the button.
Sorry for the long comment!
32 • RE: LMDE (by More Gee on 2012-04-30 18:54:46 GMT from United States)
I too liked the LMDE edition and tried the new LXDE, but it had the same issues as the other recent LXDE editions. No easy way to update and networking didn't work out of the box to run an update. The XFCE editions are OK but I recently found Snow was a little lighter after I got Symantecs mirrors to work. Out of the box they broke upon update of the sources.
33 • XFCE / LXDE (by Johannes on 2012-04-30 19:46:13 GMT from Germany)
@13, 20, 24:
I'd also like to report a lot of instabilities with LXDE. The file browther would crash very often, copying files nearly impossible. On the contrary, I almost always had stable XFCE installs, over years. (Remember Zenwalk several years ago, it was a nearly perfect distro).
Let's hope and see if Cinnamon becomes as stable and usable as XFCE!
34 • @31 (by fernbap on 2012-04-30 20:04:56 GMT from Portugal)
That is odd, though.
It must be some incompability issue between your hardware and the underlying gnome 3 crap. I would submit a bug report...
As to memory usage, Ubuntu runs on 512 MB systems, which must be also a problem between Ubuntu abd your hardware.
Or the image you downloaded is corrupted.
35 • #33: LXDE (by Caitlyn Martin on 2012-04-30 20:10:55 GMT from United States)
@Johannes: I've been using the LXDE build of SalixOS and the LXDE build of the ROSA Desktop beta for a while now. I also tried it on Vector Linux 7.0 Light. PCManFM doesn't crash for me, either on 32- or 64-bit systems. I have to wonder which version of LXDE and, specifically, of PCManFM you're using and on what distro. The file manager does have some bugs. No doubt about that. Crashes? It did once upon a time but not in a long while on any of the distros I've tried lately.
One thing we do agree on: Xfce is excellent. It does require more resources than LXDE but it's still lighter than KDE or MATE and much lighter than GNOME 3 or Unity. Unless you have very old or very limited hardware Xfce is a good choice, at least for me.
36 • #2, #9: Microsoft formats and Calligra (by Caitlyn Martin on 2012-04-30 20:17:53 GMT from United States)
Nice review, Jesse. Very informative and well written. It's nice to see an application review rather than a distro review for a change, too.
#2: I agree with Joan on this. In my business I have to deal with companies where Microsoft documents are the standard. I have to submit proposals in the format required by the company or I am not even going to be considered, and that is almost always Microsoft Word format. Sure, some companies will take PDFs. I have yet to find one that will accept Open Document formats. I wish things were different. So, like Joan, an office suite that can't produce Microsoft Word documents is useless to me. I wish it wasn't so.
@LuxPro: I have to make a living and in business the customer is always right. That's rule #1 for any successful business. If the customer wants a proprietary format that's what they get. I manage to provide it without using any proprietary software and that's good enough for me.
I will point out that AbiWord does export Microsoft Office documents if you need a lightweight word processor that can do it. I find the Libre Office or OpenOffice do a better job with the formatting, though. Gnumeric does an excellent jobs with Excel spreadsheet formatting. I do a lot of work on my netbook with those two.
37 • Microsoft formats (by Pearson on 2012-04-30 20:31:24 GMT from United States)
For those who have the option, how good are the "cloud based" office tools (e.g. Google Docs) at spitting out proprietary formats? Then the work could be done in Calligra (or whatever), using the "cloud-based" tool strictly as a document converter?
38 • Lucky? (by Matti L on 2012-04-30 20:56:04 GMT from Finland)
I've got LMDE running on my main Asus laptop after installing it from 201204 iso and the only problem I have with it is deciding if I'll mount sda1 in /media or /mnt. I've never had big problems with any Debian/Ubuntu based distros with four different laptops all from different manufacturers since I started using Linux (2006?).
39 • Mint XFCE 201204 (by Just a guy on 2012-04-30 21:05:56 GMT from United States)
In the past I used LMDE as a daily workhouse and it never failed me. Granted its often taken some effort to get it up to speed but that was just the price of admission. Now, with the recent release 201204 I found that it was almost plug and play right out of the box. I know that everyone has a unique computing environment and individual results may vary but I am a happy camper.
40 • Calligra (by Jesse on 2012-04-30 21:46:10 GMT from Canada)
Thank you to everyone for the feedback on the Calligra review. I think the developers have a good design and, with a little time, I feel they'll have a really good, flexible office suite. It was really nice to use productivity software which focused on core features and a customizable interface. If the next version includes support for exporting to MS-Office formats I'll probably switch.
41 • This week's Distros (by gee7 on 2012-04-30 21:47:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Having installed a couple of the distros mentioned in this week's issue, I have been satisfied with both. Linux Mint Debian with a Mate desktop is polished and rock solid stable. I feel confident that any bugs that crop up will soon be sorted, the developers are keen to ensure good user experience. And if you are avoiding Ubuntu and bloat, try Haiku. It's light, lean and funny, not Linux with a monolithic kernel but modular and also open source ... still only in Alpha development (its media player can't yet do subtitles so not good for fans of World Cinema, as I am) but an OS that will get better, and worth tinkering with. An interesting week.
42 • Ubuntu/Kubuntu (by Richard Carlson on 2012-04-30 22:16:01 GMT from United States)
Installed 12.04 Ubuntu and Kubuntu on 2 different 64-bit machines, 1 32-bit laptop, and 1 32-bit netbook. Works rather well and am hoping my progress and changes to come. I think Kubuntu is very good and is on par with Fedora 16/17. Just my 2-cents. . . :)
Rich
43 • Problem with older Nvidia cards on Ubuntu 12.04 (by eco2geek on 2012-04-30 22:18:55 GMT from United States)
Note for those running older Nvidia GeForce 6, 7 and 8-series cards/chipsets (this includes the 6150SE): There's a problem with the current version (295.40) of the Nvidia driver with these cards. The problem also exists with the security-patched 295.33 driver. See:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=178460
This means that if you have one of these chipsets, run Ubuntu 12.04, and install the "nvidia-current" drivers, you will most likely have problems. You will know; it's pretty apparent.
Nvidia's working on a fix; until then, you may need to manually install driver version 295.20. (It's not Ubuntu's fault.)
44 • Ubuntu/Kubuntu again (by mcellius on 2012-04-30 22:44:16 GMT from United States)
I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 (64-bit) on two machines, a desktop and a laptop, and it's working very well. I like Unity so that's what I'm using, but I have also booted into Gnome 3, classic (fallback) Gnome, Cinnamon, and MATE on both machines, and they are all in my list of login environments. I like them and feel comfortable with them all (Gnome 3 least of all, although it did seem pretty fast), and all seem to run will on Ubuntu 12.04. I do pretty much as well in any one of them.
I also installed Kubuntu 12.04 onto a laptop, mostly just for trying it out. I've always been impressed with the KDE desktop, although it just hasn't felt as comfortable to me as the others. Too managed, perhaps. But it seems very solid and I'd agree with Richard Carlson (post 42): it seems to be on a par with the latest Fedora KDE versions.
Next I'll try the 12.04 versions of Xubuntu and Lubuntu. My past experiences have been positive with their earlier versions, although I liked Xubuntu more.
45 • Glad to see Mandriva sink like the Titanic. (by uz64 on 2012-04-30 23:01:33 GMT from United States)
It's about time. Their constant bankruptcy threats, the horrible piece of shit that was their last release. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Mageia is what Mandriva always ways, before they went off the deep end and released that crap known as Mandriva 2011. As far as I can tell, Mageia is the spirit of Mandriva in the past. Mandriva's present form is barely even a shadow of their former glory--from the distribution itself, to the struggles both financially and within the company.
I don't know what to think of ROSA, but I wasn't too crazy about the crap by them that made it into Mandriva 2011. But at least it's not a sinking ship and it's under active development. I just probably won't use it myself.
Good riddance Mandriva.
46 • LMDE... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-04-30 23:42:30 GMT from United States)
RE: #39, @just a guy...
I haven't tried the newest version of LMDE. I ran the previous version for a bit.
Since you say it's *almost* plug and play out of the box I'll have to put it on flash card and play around with it.
For me, the absolute acid test of any distro is whether it plays nice with the awful Broadcom wifi in my 2 notebooks. Then we'll see... :-)
47 • What happened to wayland? (by meanpt on 2012-04-30 23:48:03 GMT from Portugal)
A year ago the implementation of wayland in Ubuntu 11.04 was deferred. So, what happened to its implementation? Is it going to be put on hold forever? Is there a project to port the linux space applications to wayland?
48 • Calligra fonts (by ac on 2012-04-30 23:57:25 GMT from United States)
Every time I get excited about a new KOffice/Calligra release, I see a screenshot showing serious font rendering/kerning issues. The fact that it's had this problem for so long, combined with the fact that they seem unembarrassed to show off this major deficiency in a screenshot, doesn't give me much hope for the future.
Nevertheless, I'll just keep waiting for a usable Calligra. I hate using Open/LibreOffice and would love it if there were a viable alternative! Also, I love pretty much everything else about Calligra.
49 • LMDE (by tdockery97 on 2012-05-01 00:02:47 GMT from United States)
I've been a fan of LMDE since its inception. I'm not, however, a fan of the Update Pack idea, so I run with the sources pointed to Debian Testing. I did a fresh install of the 201204 respin with the MATE/Cinammon desktops. I haven't really gotten into Cinammon, but I find the MATE DE to be both familiar and comfortable to work with. Changing the sources to Testing and updating went very smoothly with zero breakage. In my opinion LMDE 201204 is another winner.
50 • @46 broadcom support (by meanpt on 2012-05-01 00:14:29 GMT from Portugal)
It did improve a lot. Lateley, in 12.04, the wireless led even became white, a real luxury. I'm more worried with heating in this core i-3 and lack of a good support for my ati 5450 - by the way, who are those "developers" who are said to have tested the ati drivers offered to be installed? Go away ...
51 • Let the flame wars begin, lol... (by tek_heretik on 2012-05-01 01:20:09 GMT from Canada)
Forget Ewwwwwbuntu, Kubuntu is polished, customizable and actually works. See the Pre-installation section of their forum for my post if you want to run it from a 'hardware' Raid 0 like I am.
52 • ubuntu (by forlin on 2012-05-01 01:31:58 GMT from Portugal)
This is the ubuntu week, but lets not let it obfuscate other nice distros out there. Pear is a very sucessful distro based on Ubuntu and mimicking the osx. A joy to play and use.
AtlasX is a pearl to be discovered by the thousand distrohopers out there. Based on Debian, with an E17 environment its a startup with attention to detail and signs of maturity common to more proper to many elderly distros.
53 • kexi and LO base (by walter_j on 2012-05-01 01:50:21 GMT from Canada)
I keep looking for linux alternatives to ms access, and have yet to find anything. libreoffice base (and openoffice) are awful, and have never seemed to work for me - even for simple data bases. Kexi looks promising, but i haven't been able to get that working either. I wish LO or kexi would just provide a forms type front end for mysql and leave it at that.
Has anyone used navicat with mysql? navicat looks good, but seems to be just as expensive as ms access. ms access runs under wine pretty good now, so it's not as a pressing issue to find a linux solution as in the past. It still seems odd to me mysql and postgrel run great under linux, but don't have a good freeware front end.
I'm testing ubuntu 12.04, but am still finding bugs that drive me nuts. The worst one is where it kicks me out to the login screen anytime i have to enter the system password. HUD is also awful. Great boot speed though.
54 • *buntu 12.04 and PAE requirement! Other 12.04 impressions (by RO on 2012-05-01 02:25:27 GMT from United States)
Both Kubuntu and base Ubuntu (32-bit!) refused to install due to lack of PAE support on my pathetic old Dell D800 notebook with 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, and a really pitiful 2.1 Ghz Pentium M (per Wikipedia article, one of the few Pentiums since the Pentium Pro in 1995 that does not support Physical Address Extensions for > 4GB RAM addressing). Xubuntu and Lubuntu will, however, install. This is not in the Kubuntu release notes (did not check base Ubuntu notes) - is it that common a capability AND needed for 32-bit mode? Really - isn't that what 64-bit versions are good for?
That silly requirement rules them out for my main almost-desktop PC - with a 1920x1200 UXGA screen, I am not about to give this beast up if something decent will run on it, and about anything has so far (if not so picky).
I was able to try straight Ubuntu/Unity on my tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P1620 with a 1.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo (no PAE problem there), and for that 1280x768 8.9" touch screen it makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of EasyPeasy from a few years back that I tried on an Asus EEE netbook, but just like that precursor, I wanted to enable the ability to have overlapping or tiled resizeable windows in short order (easy enough in EasyPeasy once I found the fullscreen type of service to block at startup - did not check on that for Unity. The controls many complain about remind me a lot of the "new" iGoogle and Android type behaviors, so not that foreign to me, even if not as "precise" and "intuitive" to my long term GUI background going back to Win 3.1 and OS/2 Warp with a bit of CDE along the way on Solaris and DEC Unix and VMS.
I also found Kubuntu Plasma Active's tablet interface intriguing on the p1620 and on an even smaller Lifebook U810 with 5.6" touch screen. I need to find a way to calibrate it, though, if it is to be fully usable with that tightly integrated touch interface.
Lots of stuff to sort out here, but my first big impression is that negative of being really bummed out by the silly PAE requirement for some of the versions. Hmmm... can it be turned off with a kernel boot parameter? Off to DuckDuckGo(oogle) I go ...
YMMV
55 • Unity and UNR (by fernbap on 2012-05-01 03:00:44 GMT from Portugal)
What amazes me is that Ubuntu used to have its Nebook Remix, which not only worked well but also was not as bad as Unity.
Several years later, and Unity is still not as usable as UNR used to be.
The reason is, imho, the fact that UNR worked on top of gnome 2, which meant a lot.
Btw, you can still find UNR on a "distro" called OZ unity. It is a good experiment to try both, and make your own conclusion.
56 • Ubuntu 12.10 (by Sam on 2012-05-01 03:06:27 GMT from United States)
I remember some time ago reading a very well-argued article claiming that Ubuntu is a rather poor representative of Linux - major releases consistently having show-stopping bugs, major bugs left unfixed by the devs until the next release, etc., etc.
To add a "you should have known this would happen" widespread bug to the list - the new Ubuntu 12.10 borks Broadcom 43xx wireless cards. Out of the box, the distro fails to properly detect the card. Of course, Broadcom's not known for playing nice-nice with any linux distro, but this is such an old issue that has so many work-arounds AND was working in the previous three Ubuntu releases... Beyond that, a few work-arounds published online sort of get the card working, but with intermittent disconnects and some serious power drain.
So thanks again Ubuntu.
57 • @56 (by Sam on 2012-05-01 03:08:31 GMT from United States)
Yeah, my brain's fried. 12.04. Can't imagine the horror that'll be 12.10...
58 • #56: Those were mine :) / Frustrations with Ubuntu... (by Caitlyn Martin on 2012-05-01 05:31:49 GMT from United States)
Sam, the articles you refer to were mine and boy, did the Ubuntu fans come after me for those posts. Here are the articles you refer to:
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/ubuntu-is-a-poor-standard-bear.html
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/how-canonical-can-do-ubuntu-ri.html
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/this-takes-the-cake-sam-varghe.html
I'll point out that Fedora, Gentoo, ROSA Desktop, Pardus and even VectorLinux can deal with the Broadcom 4312 wireless chipset right out of the virtual box. If they can do it why not Ubuntu? At one time there was an issue with the licensing of the proprietary driver. Nowadays the driver is Open Source (released by Broadcom and incoporated into the b43 driver in the mainline kernel) and Broadcom permits redistribution of their firmware.
There really is no excuse anymore unless your distro does not redistribute firmware for ideological reasons. I wouldn't expect a Broadcom card to work in Trisquel or Dragora, for example. Ubuntu simply doesn't fit into that category. They distribute binary only code and non-free software. What really makes this issue annoying to me is that the Broadcom 4312 worked just fine in past releases. This is yet another example of an Ubuntu regression, in an LTS release no less.
Is it any wonder that there is increasing frustration with Ubuntu?
59 • @Caitlyn (by Microlinux on 2012-05-01 06:24:04 GMT from France)
To answer your last question: my company's (see above link) production desktops used to be based on Ubuntu LTS. Since last December, they're all based on Debian.
60 • Switched to Calligra Office (by Marjana on 2012-05-01 08:09:41 GMT from Slovenia)
I tried Calligra 2.4 when it came out and fell in love with it. I love how much more faster it works (compared to both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org) and how lightweight it is. Calligra also has much more pleasant modern user intefrace. And as was said it is made for wide screen monitors (all 3 computers at our home have such monitors) so it also uses screen space more economically in a more smart way. Dockers on the side are just fantastic. While working with Calligra I also felt that the applications are also much better integrated both into the desktop and among themselves. Luckily I'm not a prisoner of closed proprietary formatsso it doesn't even bother me anymore if I can't save into MS Office formats, hack even MS Office can now read the standard and open OpenDocument Format so there is really no excuse to keep evil proprietary formats around. If we don't put some effort to liberate ourselves from being prisoners of proprietary formats we will stay captive forever. In summary, I like Calligra so much that I switched completely to this suite and can't wait to see what it will bring in the future.
61 • RAM usage (by ix on 2012-05-01 08:29:08 GMT from Romania)
I see all the time misunderstandings about RAM usage. Someone said that Ubuntu uses as much RAM as windows 7, which is silly.
Ubuntu uses about 220 MB of RAM after boot.
Kubuntu uses about 250 MB of RAM after boot.
Lubuntu uses about 80 !!! MB of RAM after boot.
I'm obviously talking about the 12.04 series, with no modifications. You may see much higher RAM usage but that's the cache which makes your apps load faster, in fact, the more cache, the better. Use Htop to see your RAM usage.
Ubuntu is fat, in my opinion. Debian is better if you want a lightweight system, CrunchBang might be a good choice. Right now I'm on an old laptop with 128 MB of RAM and it works fine with Debian (fluxbox), even the internet, thanks to Luakit browser.
62 • Calligra Office suite (by Anonymous Coward on 2012-05-01 09:23:12 GMT from Spain)
I must say that I tried KOffice not much time ago, and it was unimpressive. It was not very intuitive for me, and buggy enough to annoy me. Even the combination of Abiword+Gnumeric gave me better results.
The lack of support for saving proprietary formats is a limiting factor, but when I want to give documents away to Windows users I use pdf anyway (and odt for personal use). Many Linux newcomers, however, tend to keep using the proprietary formats they are used to, just by inertia, so this could be a deal breaker for them... or maybe the little push the needed to drop evil formats. Who knows?
I will keep an eye on Calligra, and I am glad to see it keeps improving, but by the moment I am a LibreOffice/OpenOffice user.
63 • Ubuntu 12.04 (by ned on 2012-05-01 10:59:58 GMT from Austria)
AFAICS, Ubuntu 10.04 was the high point. Elegant, stable and just working (TM).
If only they could have stayed with it and gone on from there, improving it ...
But of course this wasn't possible and is not their fault, too - they were fucked over by the Gnome (and KDE) developers who decided that they alone know what people have to want, thus proving that they can't be relied upon. So it's no wonder Shuttleworth and the people at Ubuntu decided not to risk another instance of this happening again and tried to do their own thing instead.
So I - as much as I can understand their position - am left with having a year to look for another distribution (and it looks like I'm not the only one). Or maybe they get their act together until next April, and it is possible to install a (tweaked) version of 12.04 which at least approaches what we had in 10.04. We'll see.
64 • Re: 63 Tweaked Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Gnome 3 fallback (by hobbitland on 2012-05-01 11:34:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
I am using tweaked Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Gnome 3 fallback. Got rid of the dis-Unity and Zeitgeist spyware. I will never use Zeitgeist just like Mono and other stuff Ubuntu supports and then throw away after a few releases.
Still using a Virtualbox test out 12.04 and wait for it to stabilize before trying on my real hardware. I always try out distros in Virtualbox first and most are just not good enough.
I think Ubuntu 12.04 still has a very good base system but shame on the default settings. I will use Gnome 3 fallback and see what Redhat does with RHEL 7. Remember Ubuntu has 5 year support while most distros provide just one year support. Even Debian provides only 3 year support now.
65 • Ubuntu 12.04 (by Bob Good on 2012-05-01 12:28:20 GMT from United States)
Hi,
I'm one of those who doesn't like Unity very well. I've been happily using 10.04 LTS for quite a while and as of today consider it the best Ubuntu release by far. I really hate to see it go but time marches on...so, as a result, I've made the switch to Ubuntu 12.04 gnome-session-fallback as my DE. It's quite nice really. I do miss gnome-panel transparency and a few applets (like talika and gnome-main-menu) but I'm sure a substitution for those will appear with time. So, take heart, longtime Ubuntu users but Unity haters, and give Gnome Fallback a try. Again, it's really quite nice.
Have a good one.
Later...
66 • You people are a trip. (by Astro on 2012-05-01 13:18:01 GMT from United States)
@31, Ricky you must have a serious problem with your setup or computer. My laptop is not as powerful as yours and I run Kubuntu, Ubuntu (with Unity), PC-BSD, and even Windows 7 just fine. You must have missed something by your own admission if you're using so much ram.
@nvidia users, I had the same problems on my laptop with the nividia 6150SE chipset. The first update I did solved the problems. I did not have to do any of the x-org, or blacklist crap. Don't act so clueless.
I am surprised that the comments section has for the most part remained civil during Ubuntu release week. Most of the time it brings out the really lonely ones who want to be part of something no matter how destructive it is. (talking about distro bashing). There have been some laughs tho. Besides Redhat, even tho not perfect Ubuntu is about the only real representative of Linux to the general public and the LInux purest cannot stand that. Not because they think the Ubuntu gives Linux a bad name but it's because they don't want Linux to be used by the general public which is really sad because with today's devices the os can become irrelevant. They want to remain special. With some of these comments we can see how special they really are. ;)
67 • Xubuntu is fatter than Xfce (by cba on 2012-05-01 13:21:00 GMT from Germany)
Xubuntu is fatter than e.g. the Debian Xfce desktop, although that does not mean that Xubuntu is "bloated". IMO Xfce does not need 512MB RAM as a minimum requirement as stated in the Xubuntu release notes. 256MB RAM should be sufficient for a clean, usable Xfce system.
Do you remember this Distrowatch review?
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090427
Even today, it is a very similar story with respect to RAM usage: Xfce and Xubuntu are not the same, of course.
68 • RE: 56, 57, 58, etc. (by mcellius on 2012-05-01 14:04:47 GMT from United States)
The unreasoning haters are out. It seems that everything to them about Ubuntu is bad. Some people just dislike Unity, which is fine: not everyone will ever like the same desktop environment. Nobody, including me, minds different tastes and preferences. But others seem to want to destroy Ubuntu, Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, and everything else that has to do with Ubuntu. I don't know if this is their way of trying to destroy the competition so their own favorite distros will gain an advantage, if it's a matter of just hating anyone who achieves success, if it's just bullying, or if it's a matter of immaturity in which they can't be happy unless everyone confirms their own choices.
Just an example: the rants about a lack of Broadcom support. A supposed lack for the Broadcom 4312 chipset is specifically mentioned. Huh? This very laptop from which I am typing this has the Broadcom 4312 chipset for wireless networking, and it's worked without problems for Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, and now 12.04. (Before that I never used Linux of any variety.) Right now I've booted into Xubuntu, but I also have Ubuntu and Kubuntu on this machine, and wireless works perfectly on them all.
Now different people have different hardware, and some things work better on one than on another: every distro has to deal with that. But to claim, wrongly, that these things just don't work, is really a classic case of spreading FUD. Again, the motives aren't easy to explain, but whatever the motives they surely aren't worthy of Linux and the open-source community.
69 • Criticisms... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-01 15:17:26 GMT from United States)
RE: #68 @mcellius:
You speak of people ranting? Pot- kettle- black.
You seem to be doing plenty of ranting yourself about the "haters" spreading FUD.
What I see in 99% of these posts is people relating their experiences, and dealing with hardware that doesn't work.
I don't see anyone trying to destroy Canonical, Gnome 3, and Mark Shuttleworth- all of whom you seem to worship.
Trying to destroy the competition? Hating anyone who achieves success? Bullying? Immaturity? Seriously?
Unhappiness unless everyone else confirms their choice? Well, I hate to tell you but this one sounds sounds a lot like YOU.
And those of us who are cursed to have Broadcom wifi to deal with have earned the right to complain. We just want something that works.
And BTW- not everyone has Broadcom 4312 chips, some of us have 43xxx series chips. So because your 4312 works, doesn't mean everyone else is so lucky.
Sorry, but I don't see any villainous "motives" here, I just see a bunch of folks who really LIKE Linux talking, criticizing, and trying to work through some problems.
If you don't like what people write, then skip over it. Stop taking every criticism *personally* because some of you write is sounding downright paranoid.
There, I just gave you plenty of ammunition to jump all over me, and I'm sure you will.
70 • @65 et al (by grindstone on 2012-05-01 15:25:58 GMT from United States)
Kinda with a few people, here, in that 10.04 will probably be my last 'buntu. (It's been quite a good run, dist-upgraded from hardy-based u-lite). I too understand and wish them well and I thank all the devs and hosts for all the work!
For me, the issue is not a big DE, it's having a small distro and the libs/apps I want and only those. Seems it's onward down and a return to the roots of the trees for me (Deb or Slack). Good luck to everyone else finding their way!
71 • @61 RAM usage (by mandog on 2012-05-01 15:36:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
On my rig.
Ubuntu 64bt uses 654mb ram on a fresh boot to unity a little more to gnome shell,
Arch 64bt with unity uses 280mb same in gnome shell,
win7 64bt uses 700-750,
note I have 6gb of ram so its not a issue to me
So if as you state I don't know how to read ram usage you state ubuntu as using only 220mb of ram after bootup then arch linux runs at minus 300mb of ram I think that is impossible don't you.
Before you say any more i'm a Ubuntu user since Dapper and I am still active in the ubuntu forums. I do like Unity and Gnome shell they are the future what I don't do is defend any distro for the utter sake of it.
72 • Lucid... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-01 15:57:31 GMT from United States)
RE: #70 et al...
I use Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit on my desktop, which is core i7 with 6 GB's of ram. It is a thing of beauty. It is fast, stable, and configurable to the max. I have it set up exactly the way I want.
Like you, I can't see myself upgrading to a newer version of Ubuntu on this system. I will stick with 10.04 until support runs out, then, who knows?
What I do find really interesting is that Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop seems to use less ram than Xubuntu on my laptop, which is also a core i7, with 4 GB's of ram.
XFCE is supposed to be lighter, but it doesn't seem lighter than Gnome 2.
I find that really interesting.
I'll really miss Gnome 2. It will be a tough act to follow.
73 • RE: #69 (by mcellius on 2012-05-01 16:14:00 GMT from United States)
Wow, Edna! Talk about a rant!
I have spoken out about the "haters" and those spreading FUD, sure, but have hardly ranted.
Where have I said or even indicated that I "worship" anyone or anything, let alone Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, or Gnome 3? I do like Ubuntu and I like Unity, but that's about all I've said, and I've consistently said that it doesn't bother me if others like other DEs. I don't recall having come down one way or the other on Canonical or Mark Shuttleworth, although I do think some of the attacks on them have been more personal than anything else. And I have also said that I like the Gnome 3 DE least of the one I've tried. No rants there.
And I am puzzled, I'll admit, but all the hatred and FUD that is being spread. I figure there has to be some motivation for it, since it makes so little sense to me. But you are really stretching to try to make your point.
For example, you suggest that I'm the one who wants everyone else to confirm my choice, although I've stated over and over again that I don't care if others prefer other DEs. What I'm against is the false claims, the hyperbolic language, the FUD, and the lack of civil discourse amongst what should be a unified Linux community. We should feel free to have different opinions and to voice them - that's partly what makes a community - but the rancor seems out of place. We can do better.
As for the Broadcom 4312 chips, yes, others have different Broadcom chips. But I was responding to a comment that specifically said that the 4312 chips don't work under Ubuntu (see message #58), that they had had plenty of time to fix the problem but hadn't. That's why I didn't address others, because they weren't mentioned specifically. It's simply a false statement that Ubuntu doesn't work with the Broadcom 4312 chipset, and that's all I was addressing.
But your response is so inaccurate and over the top, and so personal, that I can only conclude that you are the one who has taken it very personally. I have not. Your response does suggest that I've hit a nerve, however.
By the way, I wrote that message from within Xubuntu, which I have installed and am using partly because you said you like it. I understand you've had lots of problems with Ubuntu, but when you mentioned that Xubuntu was working for you - at least for the moment - I wanted to learn more about it. (I would've eventually checked it out, anyway, but did it sooner because of your comments.)
74 • Ubuntu 12.04 fix (by Eddie on 2012-05-01 16:17:34 GMT from United States)
For anybody interested this line of code fixed all the problems I was having with 12.04. It has to do with package updates.
sudo dpkg -i --configure -a
Eddie
75 • Xubuntu 12.04 (by Bill on 2012-05-01 16:38:08 GMT from United States)
I am now running Xubuntu 12.04 with Compiz and Emerald and all the effects enabled and all my favorite programs installed including wine and virtualbox with conky and checkgmail. Everything works perfectly without a bug to date. Here you can see that even with all of that the RAM use is right at 500 mg:
https://backup.filesanywhere.com/FS/M.aspx?v=896b64875a66a5acadaa
Who misses Gnome 2?
76 • Haters... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-01 17:09:54 GMT from United States)
RE: #73 @mcellius:
Yes, that was a rant.
Where you see "haters" spreading FUD, I see people having a nuts and bolts discussion of what works, what doesn't, and how they feel about it.
I don't really see ANY haters here.
"But others seem to want to destroy Ubuntu, Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth, and everything else that has to do with Ubuntu. I don't know if this is their way of trying to destroy the competition so their own favorite distros will gain an advantage, if it's a matter of just hating anyone who achieves success, if it's just bullying, or if it's a matter of immaturity in which they can't be happy unless everyone confirms their own choices."
These are YOUR own words. Ranting? Hyperbolic? Over the top? Paranoid? You betcha!
Any criticism of Unity/Ubuntu/Canonical/Mark Shuttleworth presented here by users, if not presented in a manner which *you* deem appropriate, invariably seems to spark castigation from you. Sorry, but you do come off as very arrogant at times.
I don't see any motivation by any of the users here to destroy Ubuntu. Quite the opposite in fact. That's why some of us are hanging on to 10.04 for dear life. We want to keep using it because we love it, but we want to be able to use it on our terms, and in a way that suits us- not Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical.
There should be room in Ubuntu for Unity to be *configurable* so that it doesn't alienate the long time users to the point where they abandon it.
And sorry, fallback mode does not do it. It's buggy, and just a plain PITA. It's little more than a hack AFAIC.
About the Broadcom chip, my 2 notebooks have a Broadcom 43225 chip. This works in all 12.04 'buntu distros. However, someone mentioned that they tried 12.10, and Broadcom support is now broken. I can't verify this, I haven't tried it. But if it is, I'm not going to be a happy camper either.
And I'm very happy to hear you're trying Xubuntu. :-)
I like XFCE well enough, but it can't hold a candle to Gnome 2. Gnome 2 was much more sophisticated and configurable. The panels were nicer, and the Gnome applets I used were much nicer. I also don't much care for Thunar, as Nautilus is much better as a file manager.
Yes, I know I can probably use some of my old Gnome stuff in XFCE, but I'd rather not mix and match like that. I don't want to introduce instability to a system that has been remarkably stable for me. I'll just have to learn to make do with XFCE's shortcomings.
77 • @71 (by ix on 2012-05-01 17:33:17 GMT from Romania)
@71 "Ubuntu 64bt uses 654mb ram on a fresh boot [...]
you state I don't know how to read ram usage"
That is exactly what I'm stating, that you don't know how to read RAM usage. You should read it without cache, because it is cleared when in need. I think you can run a system with no cache at all, but who wants that? It would just be slower.
The amusing thing is that you are comparing Ubuntu with cache to windows 7 without cache. Ubuntu needs as much RAM on your PC as it does on mine. I told you how to read it.
78 • RE: Haters (by mcellius on 2012-05-01 17:45:41 GMT from United States)
It's the nature of things that ANYONE who comments upon hateful discourse and calls for it to stop will appear to be arrogant. I know that and don't like it, but that's how it is.
So rather than respond point by point, because obviously we aren't going to see eye to eye there, let me just explain - or try, at least - where I'm coming from. Sorry that this is so long; skip it if you want to.
I've been using Linux for a year now. Although I have a background in computing and IT (Windows and Macs), I had never heard of Ubuntu just thirteen months ago. Frustrated with Windows and knowing that Linux existed, I decided to give it a try. I started looking around to find what I could do and how to do it, I went first to check on the distros I had heard about: RedHat, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Slackware. In the process I learned about Ubuntu and the more I read the more I decided to give it a try. When I downloaded it and installed it, 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) had just been released.
I liked it, but I expected it to be different and figured I was going to have to learn something new, so I didn't care that it was different. I had various problems, mostly because I hadn't known what I was doing, so I ended up reinstalling it several times in my first month. (I tried WUBI, then decided to install it to its own partition, then realized I should have used the 64-bit version, then accidently loaded it onto an external drive, etc.)
I heard about, but didn't know about, the "war" over Unity. That means I don't have your background with Gnome 2 (although I have used it, particularly with a distro I really liked called Tuquito, which I ran for some time). But I used and learned Unity, and I liked it. (Under Windows I had used LOTS of desktop variations, changing them frequently, often using Object Desktop by Stardock, which I had come to know back when I had run OS/2.) But as I learned more, too, I started running into more and more of the DE wars. They almost always seemed to be dominated by those who screamed and yelled. There seemed to be very little discussion; it was almost all hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims. As I learned more, I saw things said that just weren't true.
In the meantime, I wondered about more than Ubuntu. I downloaded and tried lots and lots of distros, as well as every DE I could find. I had a lot of fun with it and learned a lot! But more than anything else I learned that they're all Linux! It seemed to me, as it still does, that we're all in this together.
If there was one source of discord, it seemed to be centered around Unity. With regard to it, no incendiary language seemed to be beyond what people were willing to say. I saw profanity-laced comments that were solely designed to offend, wild exagerations and terribly wrong extreme comparisons (someone said a week or two ago, in these forums, that Ubuntu reminded him of the Windows BSOD! No it didn't; he just thought it was a clever way to make an extreme statement. C'mon, even if Ubuntu crashed for him, it was nothing like the Windows BSOD, I know, someone will argue back that "it does, too!" but it's clearly just hyperbole.)
I don't care if you or anyone else likes or hates Unity, any flavor of Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, or anything else. Let's all use what we like; it's one of the great advantages of Linux. And I don't care if anyone writes the reasons for their preferences, either. Disagreement and discussion can be good and useful. But comments like "Nobody likes Unity" is clearly wrong, or even "Only losers use Unity!" are not only wrong but insulting and inflammatory. To say such things illustrates poor communication skills, perhaps, or a genuine desire to be inflammatory. If someone does have such a desire, I wonder why. And that's why I raised the issue of the motivations behind the comments: why is someone deliberately out to inflame things? My wondering is honest.
Well, this is WAAAY too long! I apologize (and perhaps it won't even be allowed due to its length).
79 • Haters (by Bill on 2012-05-01 18:10:25 GMT from United States)
@76 Edna:
Just thought you might like to know, that I am using Gnome icons and Nautilus with no problems in Xubuntu 12.04. You can see in the screenshot above #75 that cairo dock has all gnome icons.
Good Luck!
80 • @78 Haters (by DavidEF on 2012-05-01 18:20:00 GMT from United States)
mcellius,
Great commentary on the way things are. I found linux in much the same way, but further back, when Ubuntu had just been born, and not a moment too soon. I'd had enough with Windows XP. Ubuntu was the first distro I could get successfully installed. A lot has changed since then. I've read about hateful people in forums, spouting off RTFM, and treating others with disrespect, but until recently thought they had gone the way of the Dodo. Now, I only wish they had.
I have had my share of disappointments and frustration, trying in vain to get an Nvidia driver to work, or a wifi chipset, sound card, microphone, webcam, and more! It seemed at times that if it wasn't one thing, it was two. I screamed and yelled at my computer. But not once did I feel an urge to take out my frustration on another human. It just doesn't make sense to me to throw away civility because I don't like something my computer did, or didn't do. It seems to me that people ARE taking this stuff WAY too personally!
81 • @61 RAM usage by ix (by Marco on 2012-05-01 18:34:19 GMT from United States)
I LOVE this forum. Thank you for pointing me to htop. I immediately ran off to see what it showed. You note:
> Ubuntu uses about 220 MB of RAM after boot.
> Kubuntu uses about 250 MB of RAM after boot.
For me, Kubuntu 12.04 uses about 280 MB, but when I am running Ubuntu One on Kubuntu, it increases the base load to 320 MB, the same as Ubuntu (also running Ubuntu One).
Note that all seem pretty snappy in the one GB I allocate to the virtual machine in VMWare Player.
82 • Voyager Linux (by Petr on 2012-05-01 19:43:41 GMT from Czech Republic)
Guys, you want to have a nice Xubuntu flavor? Try voyager.legtux.org/
83 • Ram usage (by Leon on 2012-05-01 19:48:13 GMT from France)
These days it is normal to have 3GB Ram in a laptop, so why worry about using it?
84 • @78 Haters (by fernbap on 2012-05-01 19:52:48 GMT from Portugal)
"I don't care if you or anyone else likes or hates Unity, any flavor of Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, or anything else. Let's all use what we like; it's one of the great advantages of Linux."
And that's why i love Linux. And that's why i feel angry when the freedom to chose is taken away from me.
Gnome 2 was the most used desktop. And suddently it was taken away.
Gnome 3 is not an evolution of gnome 2, it is a completely different product. People who love gnome 2 will likely not like it, and the smoke curtain they call "gnome classic" is a joke.
I fear for the future of gnome 2, as many others. That is a legitimate concern.
And i don't see why being vocal about it would be interpreted as hate speech.
I just want my freedom to chose back.
85 • #73: Not a false statement. I think you owe me an apology (by Caitlyn Martin on 2012-05-01 19:55:58 GMT from United States)
I did not make a false statement. If you do a little research you'll find there are three different revisions of the 4312 chipset. The one in my netbook was not detected by Ubuntu 12.04 and did not work out of the box. It did work on previous versions. You have effectively called me a liar. You are cordially invited to stop by my office for a demonstration of the hardware in question. In the meanwhile you owe me an apology.
Do I hate Ubuntu? No, I simply find it a buggy mess full of regressions. I try it again and again and I am repeatedly disappointed. If you like at my writing you'll find glowing reviews of Dapper and Edgy and some positive words about Hardy as well. After that, sorry, my experience with video and printers and wireless and some revisions of Network Manager have been really, really awful, as in definitely not fit for prime time. Yet if I honestly report my experiences I'm derided as a "hater".
I've written before that if you write honest review about anything to do with Linux you'll be attacked by the blind fans. You are exhibit #1 of that trend. I've also written an article at one point saying that is the #1 problem with the Linux community today. I stand by those words. I'd rather be honest than popular.
86 • My Ubuntu experience (by claudecat on 2012-05-01 20:28:20 GMT from United States)
Interesting reading above :=}.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of those whose experiences differ from my own, I'll just say that, while an attempted in-place upgrade failed miserably (no surprise there), the install went smoothly and all hardware was detected as per usual (for ME). Still not a fan of Unity, but it is less unwieldy than before and seems to cooperate better now with other compiz features. No more jumping through hoops to get the cube for those that enjoy that kinda thing.
I'll make a point again of saying that this is just my take, and I have no doubt that Caitlyn (among others) have and will continue to have issues with bugs/hardware. I got lucky really when I bought my gear as almost everything plays real nice with most distros - i.e. atheros and ralink wireless. Even the ati video on my laptop can be made to work well with the free driver in most cases. I'll try an install later on my HP Mini with the 4312 to see if that works for that particular iteration. That is indeed the biggest pita wireless chip I've dealt with, even now that it's been freed.
87 • @77 (by mandog on 2012-05-01 20:34:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
yes I do know how to read ram usage and I used htop. I think you are quoting 32bt Ubuntu which is considerably lower I use 64bt. I still do not know what the ##### you are ranting about any way. I'm not complaining just stating that it does use more ram than other distros. The amount of ram it uses is irrelevant as I have more than enough 6gb even though it can climb to over 2gb for film editing.
88 • #85 (by mcellius on 2012-05-01 20:56:05 GMT from United States)
Caitlyn,
Then I apologize. I'm not looking to have a war here, which you'll see if you read the things I've written. I didn't know there were three such chipsets, and I'm sorry for misunderstanding.
89 • Haters... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-01 20:56:42 GMT from United States)
RE: #78 @mcellius,
Some people deliberately inflame things. You'll find trolls in almost any forum. But TBH- I don't see a whole lot of them here, on the Ubuntu forums, or on the Mint forums either. I think as a whole, Linux users are a pretty tame bunch compared to some of the other forums I've seen... LOL
It's just that a lot of us feel very strongly about the Unity issue, and some express it better than others.
I understand that Canonical wants to market Unity as a potential tablet/netbook GUI, and that's ok. What I don't understand is why they are being inflexible to the point of alienating their core power user base.
Clearly two versions of Ubuntu are needed. The Unity they have now, and perhaps a Unity meant for power users where everything is configurable.
And lest we forget- the Gnome dev's are a part of this problem as well.
If it weren't for Ubuntu, I would not have become a Linux user. A lot of other people here can relate to this, I'm sure.
There's a lot of strong feelings on both sides, not everyone expresses them the same way. We all need to cut each other some slack. :-)
90 • Nautilus... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-01 21:12:29 GMT from United States)
RE: #79, @Bill:
Wow, nice desktop! What is that Scrabble looking board you have there on your desktop? Is that some kind of game?
You have your desktop set up kind of typical XFCE. I have mine set up like Ubuntu 10.04.
I set a panel for the top, and another for the bottom instead of the default widget bar or whatever they call it. If you didn't know better and looked at my desktop, you'd think it was Gnome 2.
Nautilus is the better file manager AFAIC, and one of the features I really have trouble living without is that F3 double pane feature. I use that a lot in Ubuntu, it's quite handy, and it's something Thunar simply can't do.
Accessing network shares also is a lot easier with Nautilus. I can do it with Thunar, but it's flaky.
As far as replacing Thunar with Nautilus- I'd love to do this. But I did read of some folks having issues doing this. But it bears further investigation.
As far as a dock application, I've not used any- ever. Maybe that's an avenue I really need to explore. :-)
The way I look at it, using Linux means learning something new every day, and for the most part, I'm ok with that. ;-)
91 • Nautilus (by Bill on 2012-05-01 21:29:57 GMT from United States)
@90 Edna The game is called pente and is very small and in the repos. I used to play humans 20 years ago, now I'm trying the computer, the computer is pretty good. ;-)
I downloaded Nautilus and installed it from repositories and it works wonderfully. But I haven't tried network shares other than with Virtualbox. I use cairo dock and have since Hardy.
Take care.
92 • @85 bugginess (by grindstone on 2012-05-01 21:34:54 GMT from United States)
I remembered seeing that some underpinnings of quality problems had been identified
http://netsplit.com/2011/09/08/new-ubuntu-release-process/
and at least being happy that smart people knew. I do not know what solutions are being applied.
93 • RAM usage (by Jesse on 2012-05-01 22:00:14 GMT from Canada)
>> "Ubuntu 64bt uses 654mb ram on a fresh boot [...]
you state I don't know how to read ram usage"
Neither the 32-bit nor the 64-bit build of Ubuntu use anywhere near 600MB of RAM on a default install. Both use in the range of 220-250MB. If your Ubuntu install is using over 600MB then I'd say you've either added services (several, in fact) or you're misreading the memory usage. You could always post some screen shots to confirm.
94 • Nautilus... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-01 22:59:42 GMT from United States)
RE: #91, by Bill:
Thanks Bill. :-)
I'm going to download that game, I'm always looking for new games to play.
I'll check out Cairo dock as well. Is it fairly lightweight on system resources? I'd be using it on my notebook, so I'm trying to keep things down to a minimum... ;-)
Peace. :-)
95 • OpenBSD 5.1 has just been released. (by Anonymous Coward on 2012-05-01 23:12:56 GMT from Spain)
It seems to me I have enough "*buntu" vs "*", so I am taking this conversation to the other side of the string: from "user friendly" to "hardcore geek".
OpenBSD 5.1 has just been released! (Yes, I know I am the only one who cares).
A funny thing is that it features Gnome 3.2.1 BUT Kde 3.5.10. I hope they are not trolling in the desktop war :-)
96 • New Linux users (now and before) (by forlin on 2012-05-02 00:26:17 GMT from Portugal)
XP had an extended life because there was a demand for it. Open Source is all about using, changing and improving the code. So, in case Gnome 2 have enough followers and developers, it will be with us for many years, in the top of Ubunto, Debian, Fedora ... or as one or more independent distros.
I can tell that I had many troubles when I arrived to Linux, because I caught the KDE3 to KDE4 era and as I didn't understand noting at all about Linux and DE's I just thought I was using a stable xDistro, or an unstable yDistro :). Much better experience had the new Linux users with Gnome3 and Unity, I'm sure ... :) :)
97 • Nautilus (by Bill on 2012-05-02 00:58:49 GMT from United States)
@94 Edna: cairo-dock (no OpenGL) uses about 12 megs of ram with effects. Not bad for me on my laptop. But some folks prefer Awn as it uses less resources. I like eye candy as well as fuctionality so I have with OpenGL on both laptop and desktop. But feel free to write questions about game strategy or docks by clicking on my email above.
Peace back to ya.
98 • Re: 89 (by mcellius on 2012-05-02 01:17:15 GMT from United States)
Edna,
Yes, some people do deliberately inflame things. Have you wondered why? I do. But further, I don't think such ought to become the norm among Linux users. We can do better, I think (and I hope).
Feeling strongly about things - such as Unity - is something I can understand. That we don't all express ourselves very well I also understand. But surely there's something different between saying, "I hate Unity and here's why!" and a profanity-laden and deliberately insulting post to AskUbuntu. (I've seen the latter, by the way.)
As to various versions of Unity, I don't see the need. There are already various versions of Ubuntu, and plenty of other options, even just within Ubuntu itself. I'm now running four versions on this laptop: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu. And within Ubuntu, I can choose to login to Gnome classic (fallback), Gnome 3, MATE, Cinnamon, and Unity. That's NINE choices, and those aren't the only possibilities available, they're just the ones I have either installed or that were already included with Ubuntu 12.04.
And I'm not saying any of those are the best. There are lots of distros and different options; with Linux we can try them all and try them out. For me, right now, Ubuntu works and I like Unity, but I'm not wedded to either and I keep giving everything else a try.
99 • Ubuntu 12.04 live CD kernel vs. missing Broadcom firmware (by eco2geek on 2012-05-02 02:57:24 GMT from United States)
The Ubuntu 12.04 i386 live CD's kernel, as of a copy downloaded last night, has an issue with laptops that require the "b43" (Broadcom 43xx) driver. It gets to the point where it tries to load the firmware, and hangs to hardware reset. (Tested on a laptop with a Broadcom 4318 chipset.)
The situation is not helped by the fact that the splash screen is usually running at the point where the crash occurs, so you can't see what the error message is.
The problem and temporary workaround are listed in bug #950295 on Ubuntu's bug tracker (bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu). Either Canonical will release another live CD soon, or not that many people are using Broadcom chipsets any more.
(I don't really want to get involved in an "Ubuntu is awful vs. Ubuntu is grrrreat" argument. Suffice to say that I've upgraded it without reinstalling, every release since 9.04. It's had its share of bugs, but it's definitely made my life easier. And since they put "Gnome Classic" mode back in the 12.04 repos, I don't see any other distro knocking it off my "main distro" sda1 partition any time soon.)
100 • Ubuntu and Broadcom driver (by claudecat on 2012-05-02 03:52:07 GMT from United States)
For anyone interested:
I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my HP Mini (Broadcom 4312) and it did in fact load the driver and connect. The odd part is that it took a few minutes for it to show up... only when I got to the step where the install asks for the wireless password did I realize it was seeing the network (initially the panel icon did not show any available connections). At some point during the install process the Additional Drivers thing popped up, ultimately showing that the driver was activated and in use.
This is the first true Ubuntu install for this little machine (though Mint 12 KDE went on it fine fwiw), and after reading other folks' issues I expected trouble... none encountered.
btw - is it just me or is that new brown wallpaper with the pangolin not just fabulous?
101 • just one comment, just one, I will not return this week (by JR on 2012-05-02 04:08:35 GMT from Brazil)
I'm taking a break from the DistroWatch site, at least this section, and the reason I explain below in response to those who were crucified this week:
Edna, let it go, will not get anywhere, I've tried, they seem to me like fanboys who can not accept the criticism ...
They are doing the same thing that the gnome community did when were talking about the problems of gnome3 ... they also could not stand the criticism.
I also see only people reporting their experiences (in their own way of course). Now we can not talk about Unity without being crucified by the Ubuntu fanboys, we already could not talk about gnome3 without being crucified by the gnome community. What is the next issue to be suppressed by intolerant people?
what are you gaining from this?
I never thought I would miss the time when the only "problem" was Landor! Now I miss the harsh comments he used to do ...
Sorry about the sincerity ...
102 • Let me stop the flaming, lol... (by tek_heretik on 2012-05-02 04:56:58 GMT from Canada)
A PC is NOT a smartphone, I don't have a touchscreen so I DON'T want a smartphone GUI, thank you very much, I find things on the screen flinging by very annoying. This is why I settled on Kubuntu, IT'S STILL FRIKKIN 'NORMAL'! :-P
103 • Ubuntu and Unity (by Leon on 2012-05-02 06:48:46 GMT from United Kingdom)
If you don't like Unity, why don't you disable the Side Bar using Appearance in the System Settings and use AWN or Cairo Dock. You won't need to push any keys after that to find any files or apps. You can download Synaptic to search for files. The Compiz Fusion is already installed, so you can install CCSM and have your eye candy.
You'd then have your Gnome 2 look. Why cry?
104 • Fedora 17 (by disi on 2012-05-02 08:47:48 GMT from Germany)
I run Fedora 17 for about two months now and it's quiet a good release so far, some things that are annoying:
1. netbeans and some other packages impotant to me are orphan at the moment and not in the repository
2. I have an SSD and if it does large writing/reading jobs, this freezes the system for a moment. For now I haven't had the time or will to check for the scheduler used, since most configs are overwritten with each update this would be a hassle anyway
3. If you decide to report a bug using the Fedora bug reporting tool, it first installs ~300MB of software :D
At the moment I have no time to experiment and need the system as good and stable as it gets, in two months I will play around again.
105 • My unity with 12.04. (by Antony on 2012-05-02 11:38:32 GMT from United Kingdom)
Well, after 12-13 years of almost exclusively using KDE. I think I am going to adopt Ubuntu 12.04 & Unity. Time will tell, but at the moment I actually feel that it has quite a lot to offer as a coherent system.
Yes, Lucid was/is cool but overall was not enough to keep me from KDE. I spent a while with Gnome Shell, but returned 'home' to KDE. It's funny, but I never even considered Unity as something I would use - just looking at the screen-shots was enough, and I totally ignored it for ages. It seems that, after writing Unity off as the least likely thing I would want to use, it looks as though I shall almost certainly adopt it. Strange, indeed!
I think there is a bit of an unfortunate general ego resistance thing and perception in regards to Ubuntu (I have to admit that I would be a little shy in wearing an Ubuntu T-shirt :) ). But I think Ubuntu, while not perfect, deserves credit and to be taken maybe a bit more seriously perhaps.
I have never owned a laptop until just recently, when I was given a Dell Inspiron 6000 (1.4 cpu) with XP. Have since removed XP. Was a little hesitant at first, worried about whether the laptop's h/w might be better catered for under XP. Also, I expected to have to resort to a pretty minimal 'laptop' type distro. Well, went ahead and installed 12.04/Unity. And what a revelation! No issues and smooth as silk, with everything working well and speedy. The touchpad actually works better than under XP, where, even after playing with drivers, it was pretty awful.
I know people might say that pretty much any distro might be better than XP, so I needn't come over all moist for 12.04/Unity. But, apart from my concerns about h/w, I had resigned myself to the potential 'compromise' in having to use a very minimal distro. I did not need to even go there - this laptop is a joy to use with 12.04. I have to say that I upgraded the RAM to 2gig, from the original 256meg - but that was almost straight away, and while XP was still the cuckoo in the nest.
Main computer is: GA-M56-S3 mobo. Athlon 64 4800x2 cpu. 9800gtx. 4gig Geil RAM.
In summary, my experience so far with 12.04/Unity and the above-mentioned computers has been completely absent of drama or incident. Rather than ending up disappointed, I am feeling pretty pleased and content (fingers crossed).
Oh, btw, come on JR (101), I do not think that is a reasonable assessment. I see no evidence in this week's comments of anyone being anything like savaged .
106 • Cairo dock... and other stuff... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-02 15:18:51 GMT from United States)
RE: #97, by Bill:
Bill, I'll shoot you an email later in the week. I have a busy day today and have to run.
Just a quick question- and forgive my ignorance.
I have never, ever used any dock, of any kind, so I'm unfamiliar with them.
Is the cairo-dock your bottom panel, or the tall, transparent box on the right side of the screen with all the info in it? Or both?
My bottom panel in Xubuntu has been changed so it looks like my top one. Very plain, all the icons on the left, windows minimize to the *bottom* because having them minimize to the top drive me absolutely freaking nuts until I figured out how to change it.
I'm looking at your screen shot, and loving that delightful weather widget showing on the bottom. I'm a weather junkie, that's right up my alley. But I'm liking the tall panel to the right as well.
Just wondering.
BTW- I love love love NC. I've been there many times and always liked it.
It was in Asheville that I was introduced to shrimp and grits, and it's become a passion ever since... :-)
Peace again, Bro. :-)
107 • Unity hate... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-02 15:39:24 GMT from United States)
RE: #98 @mcellius,
Sir, I do not see all the hate you seem to see in these comments. I have seen stronger feelings expressed in a less appropriate way in previous weeks comments, but this week they seem pretty mild.
I'm already running Xubuntu on my laptop, but still find it lacking compared to Gnome 2 on Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop. I am going to have to switch distros when support for 10.04 ends. I am not thinking Xubuntu will work well enough for me on that machine.
But I haven't tried it on that system, so I don't know.
Tried Lubuntu, I don't much care for LXDE. Tried Kubuntu, not crazy about KDE although I guess I could get used to it. It's kind of a resource hog though. MATE & Cinnamon, meh. I'm trying to stick to as vanilla a distro as I can. Future *support* is first and foremost in my mind.
Gnome fallback- dismal failure. Too buggy, refuses to shut down properly, and a PITA to get to in the first place.
It's not like I haven't tried several alternatives.
Perhaps you don't see the need for different versions of Unity but I do. And I'm sure so do a lot of others here.
What I don't see is why they can't make it configurable for those of us who can't stand it the way it is? It's Linux, is that really too much to ask?
108 • Re: #107 (by mcellius on 2012-05-02 15:55:08 GMT from United States)
I agree: I don't really see much anti-Unity/anti-Ubuntu hate in the comments this week. I think that's an improvement. I don't think each week stands completely alone, of course, but I do see some reason for hope.
I don't know why they haven't made Unity more configurable. I wouldn't mind that, and I have noticed that while it isn't completely configurable, or as much as you and others might want, it is at least more configurable than in the past. In 11.04 it seemed still early in its development, in 11.10 it was better but still needed some growth, and now it really for the first time - for me - feels very usable and useful. I still expect further development, and possibly that will include more options to configure it. But I've been around computers enough to know that nothing is introduced fully developed.
I really like MATE, Cinnamon just a bit less, but I think they are good alternatives. I also think that Ubuntu's Gnome classic is quite good, at least on my systems; for me it hasn't been buggy at all (I don't deny that it has been on your system, of course). All three seem very useful to me, and easy to use. I prefer Unity, especially now, but if I had to switch it wouldn't be a major issue for me. (And I want to like KDE, I just can't quite get there, although it does impress me.)
As far as seeing the need for other versions of Unity or not, I think it's an interesting idea that I hadn't heard before. It wouldn't be a need for me, but if it would solve your problems that would be great.
109 • civility (by user/observer on 2012-05-02 18:12:26 GMT from United States)
The only reason I come here anymore is to harvest the few comments from those that do not go out of their way to berate others for having a differing opinion on a particular subject.
Sadly there seems to be with each passing week less and less of these types in evidence.
Considering how civility in general is on the decline these days, I really shouldn't be surprised at this development.
For those few that still offer up their opinions and reviews without all the judgmental attitude, I thank you, and hope you will not be driven away by the multitude of overly argumentative fanbois.
110 • @95,74 (by notsure on 2012-05-02 18:14:44 GMT from United States)
nope, there's 2 of us ;^)
I upgraded to 5.1 on my laptop last night -- smooooth.
oh, and to upgrade packages, change .profile PKG_PATH to point to 5.1 then pkg_add -u
sweeeeeeeeeeeet.
not sure why kde is still in 3.5... but it's in packages/ports, not base, as you already know. I could speculate, but that wouldn't be fair to anyone.
111 • Q&A question on mixing and matching (by Patrick on 2012-05-02 19:07:30 GMT from United States)
Jesse,
I feel like you didn't quite get to the bottom of the mixing and matching Q&A question. Most of us know the difference between KDE and, say, LXDE or Xfce and how much memory they use. Reading it over again, I wonder if the question was intended to be more along the lines of:
If running a KDE application loads most of the KDE libraries (all the stuff that makes KDE heavy in the first place) into memory, is there any advantage to doing it in a light environment, compared to running it in KDE where all those same libraries are in effect already preloaded? Running it in KDE, it could be considered a light application in a heavy environment, running it in LXDE would make it a heavy application (because it still needs to load all those libraries it needs, which happen to be part of the KDE project) running in a light environment. The resulting memory use may not be any less if this is the case. So I guess the question is really how much of the KDE system gets loaded when you load a typical KDE application.
112 • Hit count (by John P. on 2012-05-02 19:49:45 GMT from United States)
Can someone explain to me how this hit counter works? Ubuntu 12.04 was released last week and the counter only went up a handful of times? How can that be?
I think this site favors Linux Mint!!!
113 • @112 and other stuff (by claudecat on 2012-05-02 20:16:01 GMT from United States)
I'd imagine that most Ubuntu users/potential users don't use DW as their portal, while Mint is still more likely to be familiar mostly to those "geekier" folks like me who come here. And I think I can speak for Ladislav in saying that this site does not "favor" any distro, at least not intentionally.
On an unrelated topic, I've had altogether too much free time on my hands of late, so I decided to go back in time and read a rather large sampling of past issues of DWW and comments therein - going back to 2003. Quite interesting to say the least to see the reactions to some of the major changes that have occurred over the years, and the changing of the guard in terms of regular posters and such. Has anyone else been bored enough to to this?
114 • Mixed Desktops (by Jesse on 2012-05-02 20:16:29 GMT from Canada)
@111
Patrick, I think you raise a very valid point. Perhaps the issue in question is more about loading libraries into RAM and how much of a foot-print KDE programs have. Let's look at some numbers.
On my system running KDE takes about 220-230MB of RAM, give or take a little. Running Xfce, last time I checked, took around 120-130MB. And running LXDE took about 75MB if I'm not mistaken.
To load the KDE libraries into memory for a run of the mill KDE app takes around 25MB of RAM. This means if you're running Xfce and using about 130MB of RAM, loading the KDE libraries will take your memory usage up to around 155MB (give or take a little).
So KDE apps + KDE libraries + Xfce is still quite a bit lighter in memory than running KDE apps on the KDE desktop. The first time a KDE app is loaded in a Xfce/LXDE environment it may take a second longer to load as the libraries are cached, but the over all memory usage will be less in the lighter environments.
115 • Cairo Dock MATE etc (by Bill on 2012-05-02 23:07:07 GMT from United States)
@106 Edna: Dock at the bottom is Cario Dock. Bar on the right is Conky (which has a weather component I don't use).
@ All: A note on MATE. When it first came out I thought that it would be my obvious choice to replace Gnome 2, but I watched my CPU usage (4 CPU's) in MATE w/Compiz go up to 26 to 32% each, whereas in Gnome they hovered at 2 to 4%. Quite a difference. I do not want my fans to come on to cool my system like they always did with Windows; Consequently, I tried Xfce and discovered to my delight that I could run ALL of my favorite Gnome programs and CPU's run in the 4% range again. I really don't see any reason to change, at least for the next 3 years.
116 • @112 (by Blah on 2012-05-03 01:16:40 GMT from United States)
It defaults to a 6 month average od Hits per day
Try changing the drop down to "Last 30 days" or "Last 7 Days" and click refresh.
117 • @105 (by JR on 2012-05-03 02:39:05 GMT from Brazil)
-->"Oh, btw, come on JR (101), I do not think that is a reasonable assessment. I see no evidence in this week's comments of anyone being anything like savaged ."
It's a week after week perception, that's a long way back to understand that statement, and yes, I'm still here, but just to clarify this!
118 • @93 • RAM usage (by Jesse (by mandog on 2012-05-03 12:41:05 GMT from United Kingdom)
After I read your reply I got a little concerned have I been advising people incorrectly how to work out ram usage well I'm 63 has my brain finally got to the differing stage. So I checked a few sites and low and behold no its the same as I remember it so now I feel good
I had to do some work to achieve the results below, some things were not to my liking.
Nvidia graphics driver for instance was installed by jockey and set up to start after login in autostart not by the kernel at boot strange!. when I installed the Nvidia way I was prompted the kernel was trying to boot the Nouveau driver that I had previously uninstalled and blacklisted. After another reboot Installing the Nvidia way this is the result
####@####:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 4962 711 4250 0 91 267
-/+ buffers/cache: 352 4609
Swap: 415 0 415
To me this is acceptable I'm assured in the Ubuntu forums 64bt uses about 50% more ram and verifies my own findings
119 • RAM usage (by Jesse on 2012-05-03 13:03:01 GMT from Canada)
Re: 118
In your earlier post (post 71) you mentioned Ubuntu with Unity was using 654MB of memory. Now, with the NVIDIA driver issue sorted out, it's using 352MB. That's quite a change. Are you saying fixing your graphics driver nearly halved your RAM usage?
120 • @119 RAM usage (by Jesse (by mandog on 2012-05-03 15:09:50 GMT from United Kingdom)
Well it all points that way,
Its a known fact that Nouveau and Nvidia don't play The nvidia way makes sure the former is correctly blacklisted. Draw back is it has to be recompiled if you upgrade the kernal.
Saying that this is the only time I’ve had problems with Jockey.
My big concern is the entry in Auto-start is it meant to be run like that.
There are several posts in the Ubuntu forums on high ram usage,
Apart from that the improvements to unity are all in the right direction and I know there are more to come. Its nice to see them moving on not sitting there as so many operator do.
121 • Saluki (by Georgia Savage on 2012-05-03 15:13:09 GMT from Canada)
Saluki Puppy looks like the successor to Quirky Puppy. I hope it flies.
122 • Cairo... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-03 15:26:55 GMT from United States)
RE: #115, by Bill:
Thanks Bill. So cairo replaces the default dock at the bottom. I'm not sure how well that would work for me since I turned the default XFCE bottom "dock" into a regular panel, just like I have on top.
Conky looks interesting as well though. I'll have to look at that one as well.
Question for Bill, and all:
I am running Xubuntu 12.04 beta 2 on this notebook. It runs great. I have no issues.
Should I upgrade to the new release, and if so- can I do an in-place upgrade through upgrade manager, or do I have to do a full install of the newer version?
I hate to mess with a system functioning this well, and am wondering if I should just leave well enough alone for now.
123 • @122 (by mcellius on 2012-05-03 15:57:30 GMT from United States)
Edna,
If you're running Xubuntu 12.04 beta 2 and you are keeping current with all the updates, you have the latest version and don't need to do an upgrade. Since it works so well for you, anyway, if I were you I'd stick with it. (Have your updates pushed out a newer kernel - 3.2.0-24 - recently? If you're still getting those, you're up-to-date.)
You CAN do an upgrade, of course, through the upgrade manager. If you use additional PPAs, it might disable some of those (older versions), but otherwise all it's likely to cost you is time (I found that the online upgrade took me several hours). Of course, as with all such things, I'd recommend you backup first.
124 • Updates... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-03 16:36:18 GMT from United States)
RE: #123, @mcellius:
I am a bit behind in my updates. The update manager brought up some 400+ updates and I haven't done them all yet.
I do notice that the new Linux kernel headers are on the list, and in Synaptic as well, marked as "upgradeable"- to 3.2.0-24 as you said. My current kernel is 3.2.0-20.
I would like to just update the kernel for now, and not everything on that list, much of which I don't use.
Do you think it's safe to do that from Synaptic? I've always just done auto updates before, I've never done it manually. I don't want to bork my system.
I am in the camp of leaving well enough alone, and just updating the kernel and the stuff I have to, for now anyway.
Thanks for your help! :-)
125 • RE: 124 (by mcellius on 2012-05-03 17:23:38 GMT from United States)
Edna,
With that many updates, it'll take awhile! Still, probably less than an hour - including the kernel upgrade. The updates won't hurt, and most are just fixes, anyway; I'd recommend you do them (maybe when you're leaving the computer for awhile). Still, with that many updates, you might find it just as easy to upgrade from beta 2 to 12.04.
Either way, the kernel will require an update, as it isn't included in the 12.04 release (it came out a few days later). Yes, I think it's safe to upgrade the kernel using Synaptic (although I'm hardly an expert), but don't delete the old kernel for awhile; it's nice to have an old one available if anything goes wrong.
126 • Updates... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-03 18:16:43 GMT from United States)
RE: #125 @mcellius:
You may think you're hardly an expert but you are more of an expert than I am for sure. :-)
You're better with the nuts and bolts stuff, I'm usually lost if I don't have an easy GUI way to do things... ;-)
About upgrading the kernel from Synaptic- do I have to *delete* the old one???
I thought upgrading would just overwrite the old one?
I think you're right- I think I might be better off just doing a full upgrade instead. But since everything is running ok for now I'm going to put it off for a bit. I see no compelling reason to do it just yet.
That is, unless they have implemented some fabulous new features... LOL
127 • Edna Xubuntu Updates (by Bill on 2012-05-03 19:33:45 GMT from United States)
@126 Edna: I agree with mcellius: probably better to start update manager and go have dinner. You CAN update the kernel with synaptic, but make sure you get the header files too. NO Don't delete the old kernel yet. That way it will be in your list as a choice when you boot up. So if you do mess up your system, you can go back. I always back up first BEFORE I experiment. Image for Linux is my backup of choice.
I tried to get a complete upgrade from Xubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 and it was buggy after that. But I had been playing with Xubuntu 12.04 Beta on another partition and so I just upgraded that using the Alternate CD and now it's quite nice and very smooth.
Good Luck, and don't forget if you just run Update Manager you'll probably be just fine.
128 • RE: #126 (by mcellius on 2012-05-03 19:42:22 GMT from United States)
I don't know if any of the updates bring new features: they're mostly bug fixes and securty updates, I think. To me they'd be worth it, but I also understand the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach.
As for upgrading the kernel, and using Synaptic, I'm really not very knowledgeable. But since you're asking, I would go ahead and upgrade the kernel and I would not delete the old kernel. Of course, once you upgrade the kernel, Xubuntu will want to reboot, so let it.
At the grub menu, if you get one, you will likely see just the previous kernel; if that's the case it's all right. Once you've booted up, open a terminal and type:
sudo update-grub
This will cause grub to update and your new kernel will be listed when you boot next time. (Your old on will be listed, too, so it'll be easily available for awhile so you can boot back into it should there be any problem with the new one. You probably won't have problems with the new one, but when changing kernels it is really best to be a bit paranoid.)
129 • Broadcom & Ubuntu 12.04 (by Alex on 2012-05-03 20:01:01 GMT from United States)
I just installed Lubuntu 12.04 on my Dell Latitude E6400 which has the Broadcom nic. Neither ethernet nor wireless work out of the box.
130 • RE:#129 (by Mac on 2012-05-03 20:38:03 GMT from United States)
Running Kubuntu 12.04 daily build and now 12.04 LTS. On Dell Latitude E6400 and E4300 no trouble at all and usb wireless N. Good look to you have never used Lubuntu. KDE fanboy also run aptosid KDE. I know I have to get the B43 driver in aptosid.
Have fun
131 • RE:#130 (by Mac on 2012-05-03 21:30:56 GMT from United States)
Triple boot with Win 7 and everything works great. Hope you can solve your problem.
Have fun
132 • Calligra (by Bob on 2012-05-03 22:01:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
@Jesse: You did a review of Calligra Suite, and yet you didn't mention Krita once, which has been their best and most mature program for a long time...
133 • Calligra "review" (by Kurt K. on 2012-05-03 23:57:12 GMT from Germany)
Below the text box I type this is a Mark Twain quote: "It is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Quite frankly it applies 100% to the Calligra "review". It was published pretty much a week after even the first bugfix release for the stable version was shipped. Yet, the author was still using Beta 6 which was released in January and superseded by FOUR subsequent releases! How serious can we take a reviewer on one of the most visited Linux-related websites who is incapable of obtaining a recent version of the reviewed software. I could understand not using 2.4.1 -- maybe it was released after the article was written -- but not even 2.4.0? WTF?
The inability to not find after a week of use how to add images to a document in Words just confirms that the author can't be taken serious.
Another dubious criticism is about the inability to export to proprietary formats. FFS Microsoft Office can read ODF files just fine since five years! Why should the Calligra devs waste development resources if MS Office is better anyway at importing ODF files than Calligra will ever be able to handle export? MS Office 2012 will extend ODF support to ODF 1.2.
134 • RE: 133 Calligra "review" (by ladislav on 2012-05-04 00:35:47 GMT from Taiwan)
The author explained clearly why he reviewed a beta rather than the final release.
In an ideal life you would always make the perfect choices that would please everybody, but in reality one often has to make some compromises. he author could have waited a few weeks before Calligra final would appear in his distro's repository before attempting a review (by which time the Calligra developers would have most likely released an updated version, so that one of the readers here could complain about not reviewing the very latest!). Or he could have used another distro which does ship with the latest Calligra. Or something else.
Personally, I don't like reviews of beta software myself, but as a general introduction to an office suite that few people would have had a chance of using, I don't see anything wrong with reviewing a late pre-release. If you find no value in such a review, that's fine - you can always skip it or go look for a more recent Calligra review elsewhere.
135 • Which distro offers application X, version 1.23 (by RollMeAway on 2012-05-04 03:30:58 GMT from United States)
I've been visiting Distrowatch for >10 years now. Never used this resource before.
I recently read about Xfce-4.10.0, their latest release.
Was trying to find a distro that offered the latest.
While I have used the "Search by Distribution Criteria" frequently, somehow never
looked at the "Package searches" section.
So:
http://distrowatch.com/search.php?pkg=xfdesktop&pkgver=4.10.0#pkgsearch
shows only six of the hundreds listed here. Four of those are source based.
One indication of "Cutting Edge" distributions?
If interested go to xfce.org and click on the 4.10 tour.
136 • @119 RAM usage (by Jesse (by mandog on 2012-05-04 07:55:23 GMT from United Kingdom)
this seem to confirm what I found
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-pangolin.htmlSystem stability, resources
I am not yet 100% sure how much memory should a typical Linux distro use on this machine, as I've not tested that much. Typically, a 32-bit distro would eat some 350MB while a 64-bit one would go for 450MB. With high-end Nvidia cards, the toll climbs to twice or even thrice as much. Pangolin on top of a T61 with a 64-bit processor, an Intel card and two SSD would swallow around 500MB of RAM without any apps running. That's not much, but then it's not a low figure either. CPU was quite most of the time, and the system was extremely responsive, even in relation to Ubuntu 11.10 previously tested on this same hardware. The change is noticeable.
137 • intel opencl (by Colin on 2012-05-04 12:42:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
Intel opencl on ubuntu ... or any other distro for that mater! ... pleeeeeaaaasssse!!!
138 • RE: 133 Calligra "review" (by Kurt K. on 2012-05-04 12:54:40 GMT from Germany)
"The author explained clearly why he reviewed a beta rather than the final release."
No, he just explained that he was incapable of adding a repo that features the final release.
"If you find no value in such a review, that's fine - you can always skip it or go look for a more recent Calligra review elsewhere."
No, it's not a review without value. It's worse. It makes good software look bad. It's actively hurting a FOSS community project which is immoral. It makes readers think that Words is a mere text editor with simple formatting and no way to add images and such.
139 • Updates... (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-04 15:42:33 GMT from United States)
RE: #127 & 128- @Bill & mcellius:
Since I'm kind of a chicken, I'll let update manager do it's thing instead of my doing it a piece at a time. In fact, I just fired up update manager and it's going now.
And even if the whole thing goes south, it's not like this is my main computer. That would be my desktop. If it has problems I'll just reinstall it. It's really not that big a deal.
I have another almost identical notebook I can use just in case... that one has Mint 11 on it- for now... ;-)
Thanks for the help guys. You both are very knowledgeable :-)
140 • RE: #139 (by mcellius on 2012-05-04 16:08:45 GMT from United States)
Edna,
I think you made a great choice! The update manager seems to do a good job with these things and I hope your experience will be positive and successful. I look forward to seeing your comments about it.
141 • Updates- success! (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-04 17:30:13 GMT from United States)
RE: #140, @mcellius:
Ok, update manager has finished, I rebooted, and entering the command "uname -a" into a terminal returns this regarding the kernel:
"Linux TimelineX-i7 3.2.0-24-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP..." (other text cut for brevity...)
So I am guessing I now have the latest kernel.
I had no errors or problems while updating, it went smoothly.
The GUI doesn't look any different, but I'm guessing there weren't really any cosmetic changes. Not until the newer version of XFCE is implemented, anyway. ;-)
142 • @ALL the people concerned with RAM/CPU usage... (by tek_heretik on 2012-05-04 18:04:51 GMT from Canada)
yes, insane CPU usage is bad, just sitting idle at the desktop, on the other hand, I WANT my OS to utilize my RAM, RAM is cheap these days, go buy some and enjoy your faster system. I am sitting at my desktop in 64-bit Kubuntu 12.04, 4 programs open (Firefox included obviously, I am typing this, lol) and my CPU is averaging 10% of 400% (4 cores @ 100% each, socket 775 Core2 Quad @ 2.83 GHz), I have the cube desktop enabled and most of the GUI candy enabled (no fading or window sliding, hate that, lol).
143 • RE: #141 (by mcellius on 2012-05-04 18:42:30 GMT from United States)
Edna,
That sounds perfect! Yep, you now have the latest kernel and all the fixes and updates are there, too. I don't remember any cosmetic fixes with all those updates, either, although you might occasionally find a few changes. But this is exactly how updates are supposed to work. And even though you won't see some of the fixes and changes, your computer will actually probably be more secure, more stable, and more reliable.
I think there is a newer version of Xfce coming out soon, isn't there? (If I recall correctly, first there'll be a smaller update, which fixes things under the hood but doesn't affect the appearance much.)
144 • XFCE (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-05-04 19:40:31 GMT from United States)
RE: #143 @mcellius,
So far, so good. I'm using the machine now and all seems well.
I believe the next version of XFCE is 4.10 (?), not sure... which is yet to be implemented.
From the little bit I've read about it, there do seem to be some minor changes coming to the GUI.
They'll hopefully be changes for the better... fingers crossed... :-)
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| • Issue 1017 (2023-05-01): Xubuntu 23.04, Debian elects Project Leaders and updates media, systemd to speed up restarts, Guix System offering ground-up source builds, where package managers install files |
| • Issue 1016 (2023-04-24): Qubes OS 4.1.2, tracking bandwidth usage, Solus resuming development, FreeBSD publishes status report, KaOS offers preview of Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1015 (2023-04-17): Manjaro Linux 22.0, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0, Arch Linux powering PINE64 tablets, Ubuntu offering live patching on HWE kernels, gaining compression on ex4 |
| • Issue 1014 (2023-04-10): Quick looks at carbonOS, LibreELEC, and Kodi, Mint polishes themes, Fedora rolls out more encryption plans, elementary OS improves sideloading experience |
| • Issue 1013 (2023-04-03): Alpine Linux 3.17.2, printing manual pages, Ubuntu Cinnamon becomes official flavour, Endeavour OS plans for new installer, HardenedBSD plans for outage |
| • Issue 1012 (2023-03-27): siduction 22.1.1, protecting privacy from proprietary applications, GNOME team shares new features, Canonical updates Ubuntu 20.04, politics and the Linux kernel |
| • Issue 1011 (2023-03-20): Serpent OS, Security Onion 2.3, Gentoo Live, replacing the scp utility, openSUSE sees surge in downloads, Debian runs elction with one candidate |
| • Issue 1010 (2023-03-13): blendOS 2023.01.26, keeping track of which files a package installs, improved network widget coming to elementary OS, Vanilla OS changes its base distro |
| • Issue 1009 (2023-03-06): Nemo Mobile and the PinePhone, matching the performance of one distro on another, Linux Mint adds performance boosts and security, custom Ubuntu and Debian builds through Cubic |
| • Issue 1008 (2023-02-27): elementary OS 7.0, the benefits of boot environments, Purism offers lapdock for Librem 5, Ubuntu community flavours directed to drop Flatpak support for Snap |
| • Issue 1007 (2023-02-20): helloSystem 0.8.0, underrated distributions, Solus team working to repair their website, SUSE testing Micro edition, Canonical publishes real-time edition of Ubuntu 22.04 |
| • Issue 1006 (2023-02-13): Playing music with UBports on a PinePhone, quick command line and shell scripting questions, Fedora expands third-party software support, Vanilla OS adds Nix package support |
| • Issue 1005 (2023-02-06): NuTyX 22.12.0 running CDE, user identification numbers, Pop!_OS shares COSMIC progress, Mint makes keyboard and mouse options more accessible |
| • Issue 1004 (2023-01-30): OpenMandriva ROME, checking the health of a disk, Debian adopting OpenSnitch, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1003 (2023-01-23): risiOS 37, mixing package types, Fedora seeks installer feedback, Sparky offers easier persistence with USB writer |
| • Issue 1002 (2023-01-16): Vanilla OS 22.10, Nobara Project 37, verifying torrent downloads, Haiku improvements, HAMMER2 being ports to NetBSD |
| • Issue 1001 (2023-01-09): Arch Linux, Ubuntu tests new system installer, porting KDE software to OpenBSD, verifying files copied properly |
| • Issue 1000 (2023-01-02): Our favourite projects of all time, Fedora trying out unified kernel images and trying to speed up shutdowns, Slackware tests new kernel, detecting what is taking up disk space |
| • Issue 999 (2022-12-19): Favourite distributions of 2022, Fedora plans Budgie spin, UBports releasing security patches for 16.04, Haiku working on new ports |
| • Issue 998 (2022-12-12): OpenBSD 7.2, Asahi Linux enages video hardware acceleration on Apple ARM computers, Manjaro drops proprietary codecs from Mesa package |
| • Issue 997 (2022-12-05): CachyOS 221023 and AgarimOS, working with filenames which contain special characters, elementary OS team fixes delta updates, new features coming to Xfce |
| • Issue 996 (2022-11-28): Void 20221001, remotely shutting down a machine, complex aliases, Fedora tests new web-based installer, Refox OS running on real hardware |
| • Issue 995 (2022-11-21): Fedora 37, swap files vs swap partitions, Unity running on Arch, UBports seeks testers, Murena adds support for more devices |
| • Issue 994 (2022-11-14): Redcore Linux 2201, changing the terminal font size, Fedora plans Phosh spin, openSUSE publishes on-line manual pages, disabling Snap auto-updates |
| • Full list of all issues |
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TrueNAS CORE (previously known as FreeNAS) is a free and Open Source Network-Attached Storage (NAS) operating system that supports file, block and object storage. TrueNAS CORE is FreeBSD based and is a community-supported branch of the TrueNAS project, sponsored by iXsystems. It also has a commercial branch called TrueNAS Enterprise and a free and HyperConverged storage solution called TrueNAS SCALE. The TrueNAS SCALE branch is based on the Debian Linux distribution.
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View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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