Ubuntu 11.10

Talk about other linux distributions, or even other OSes.
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GJones
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Ubuntu 11.10

Post by GJones »

Anyone tried this yet?

It unfortunately still has the issues common to all Debian-based distros (i.e. it's a pain to compile stuff on it). The lack of Synaptic in the default install only makes this more annoying, since the Software Center can't install -dev packages.

Still... The good:

- Unity 2D is included by default now. It's both faster and (IMO) prettier than the 3D version. I still have some conceptual problems with it, mind; it looks like it would play badly with a dual-screen setup, and I don't really see the point of having the bar on top. (Why not leave application menu bars alone, and integrate the system tray into the sidebar?) That said, it strikes me as a sane middle ground between Gnome 3/Unity 3D glitz overload and Gnome 3's crippled fallback mode.

- They fixed the Software Center! It no longer bogs my laptop down in endless CPU and I/O hoggery.

The bad:

- Unity's launcher window is better than it was, but it still needs too much clicking, and looks confusing for novices. IMO a user should only have to click once to show all installed applications, with further clicks narrowing the selection; that would be friendlier and more intuitive.

- Unity 3D is still very slow, and is still the default desktop. Beats me why they don't ditch this turkey.

And, of course, the ugly:

- The update-fest is already starting. Last night CUPS had to be updated, and there are more coming down the line...

- Parts of AppArmor's userspace utilities are missing from the default install, so I can't enable Firefox's AppArmor profile.

Overall, from what I've seen in Ubuntu's past, I consider this a pretty good release. Not enough to make me switch to Ubuntu as my main OS, but good enough to make me a little bit more optimistic about Linux's future on the desktop.
GJones
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by GJones »

Oh, one definitely bad thing I overlooked: you can't change the GUI fonts! This isn't a huge issue because the default fonts are fairly large and readable (at least in English)... But seriously, that's kind of dumb.
Claire
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by Claire »

I have a i3 Quad-core with 4 GB of RAM. Ubuntu is running as a stand-alone operating system on the only drive partition. I did not install it with Wubi. The install was off a USB thumbdrive directly from ubuntu.

A few weeks ago I tried Ubuntu 11.04 but it, like 11.10, crashed on the second boot-up and would not boot up. I decided Ubuntu was too unstable to trust and went back to Windows 7, but in trying to create a dual-boot with Ubuntu and Windows, the GRUB files were moved to an external drive. I just decided to try something new and use Ubuntu again.

Applications frequently freeze. This is my second time installing the operating system on my computer (the first installation crashed on the second boot). Terminal refuses any input when I need to type in a password to validate an install (which is frustrating because Ubuntu requires a password on the account). Half the themes the OS comes with don't even show up in the settings panel which made me want to install new themes, but that's practically impossible because Ubuntu's filesystem is read-only (only root can read and write on it and there's no way to change it). The extensions I've tried hardly ever work, (Compiz, Awn settings, Gnome Tweak, etc). I've had better luck with Windows Vista.

What am I doing wrong? Or is Ubuntu 11.10 just unstable? I've gotten to the point that I'd rather pay $100 for a system that will actually boot up twice in a row than mess with Ubuntu.
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thenktor
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by thenktor »

Claire wrote:What am I doing wrong? Or is Ubuntu 11.10 just unstable? I've gotten to the point that I'd rather pay $100 for a system that will actually boot up twice in a row than mess with Ubuntu.
These types of errors are often caused by failing hardware, especially RAM. I'd suggest to run a recent version of memtest86: http://www.memtest86.com/
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GJones
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by GJones »

Try is booting with the 'noapic' option. This routes all interrupts to one CPU core, instead of trying to distribute them evenly; it can solve a lot of stability problems on multicore machines, and the performance hit is negligible for most desktop tasks.

The other thing you might want to do is scan your hard drive for bad blocks (using the 'badblocks' command). This could be a RAM problem as thenktor says; but it seems a little suspicious to me that Windows works fine. If this is a hardware problem, I'm guessing it would be bad blocks on the partition Ubuntu is installed on - in my experience that can cause such behavior.

NB: It used to be normal to find bad blocks even on new hard drives. With modern drives though, if you start seeing bad blocks, the drive is probably going to die fairly soon.
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laprjns
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by laprjns »

Hate to tell you but "Claire" is some type of bot. See this post
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 838AASSA3E
and compare it to "Claire's" above
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?"
GJones
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by GJones »

Oh I see, the signature. Wow. The trouble people go to to spam these days!
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thenktor
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Re: Ubuntu 11.10

Post by thenktor »

GJones wrote:Oh I see, the signature. Wow. The trouble people go to to spam these days!
This is indeed the first spam post of this type I've noticed. Spam sucks :evil:
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