Ubuntu 10.04 Released | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 10.04 Released

releases.ubuntu.com

267 pointsglymor108 comments

I have been running lucid on my desktop for about two months know fully knowing the caveats. Here are some things ive found a) Its visually the most slick linux distro I have used so far. b) Ubuntu now has a cloud offering for consumers which allows you to sync data between computers much like dropbox. c) Ubuntu now has a enterprise cloud offering where the act of maintaining multiple ubuntu computers has been simplified. You can install packages / run commands on multiple machines at once from convenient web interface. You can even check on the machine load from this interface. - http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private d) Plymouth now comes standard. This means the entire boot experience from bootup to X is very seamless. Kudos to the fedora folks for coming up with this, props to the ubuntu folks for integrating it. e) The only issue ive had with lucid is that 2 of my 1.5TB SATA drives are not detected. Ive opened a ticket for this sometime back but the ticket hasnt received any love so far.

All in all, lucid is a great release. It will make it harder for my osx using friends to make fun of my desktop. Tux has shiny new clothes :)

"... The only issue ive had with lucid is that 2 of my 1.5TB SATA drives are not detected. Ive opened a ticket for this sometime back but the ticket hasnt received any love so far. ..."

Can you post your ticket number plz. No way am I going to risk an upgrade without SATA support. What drives are you using?

You dont need to worry if youre not on a nvidia chipset mobo. Also the bug is not a regression, the drives havent been detected in 9.10 either. The relevant bugs are - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/501950 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/396738 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/540939

Release Announcement:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2010-April...

Technical Overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004overview

Release Notes:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004

The look and feel is much improved. The default theme is great -- some of the reds/oranges could be tweaked, tasteful use of transparency (Win 7's is pretty gaudy, IMO), useful desktop effects (alt-tab, desktop switching, minimize/restore). My favorite improvement is all the stuff they did to get rid of the system tray and consolidate the "notification area". It looks better and is much more useful. Occasionally the battery icon disappears which is annoying but hopefully that's fixed in the final release.

Everything (almost) worked out of the box on my Thinkpad SL410. The mute and mic button on the keyboard don't work by default. Hibernate on lid-close, power saving, and all that jazz work perfectly. It cold boots incredibly fast. Noticeably faster than Windows 7.

I haven't figured out how to disable the track pad yet (it isn't in the mouse settings). :/

I've been using the RC for almost a week and had it crash once because of (I believe) Pulse Audio. shakes fist in air menacingly

Before I was using Arch and it never crashed (in a year) but I was using fewer programs and it was very utilitarian.

Did you try editing your xorg.conf to turn the trackpad off? Or maybe you were talking about a gui solution.

I'm about to install 10.04 on my new thinkpad t500. Can't wait!

Yes! There is no xorg.conf. And I'd guess since Hal is gone xorg is now auto-configured through udev somehow.

There is a package you can install called gpointing-device-settings that I've been using to tweak my touchpad. I believe it has an option to disable.

It has the setting but doesn't appear to do anything...

If I can get it to work I'll follow up later.

Ah. The package has a history with gsynaptics, so maybe it is synaptics specific. Sorry it didn't work out.

In gconf-editor, set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/off to true.

Thanks, that one worked.

I haven't figured out how to disable the track pad yet (it isn't in the mouse settings). :/

You can do this in the BIOS.

Yeah, I could on my old ThinkPad. The SL410 BIOS doesn't support this.

Unless I completely missed it. But I went over the BIOS thoroughly a few times.

I'm speaking from experience with the T400, so perhaps the SL410's BIOS doesn't support it.

My Iphone 3GS now syncs with Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 10.04 straight out of the box.

That is killer. To think of the hell I had to go through to get my iPod touch to sync a year ago.

Is this specific of Ubuntu or is upstream with Rhytmbox?

I think it is probably upstream with a bunch of libraries used by Rhythmbox that, as far as I know, were experimental a few months when last I tried to get that to work (unsuccessfully).

It uses this library: http://libimobiledevice.org/

So presumably, it's available to one and all, regardless of distro. (At least until Apple gets wind of it...)

That was one of the last things keeping Windows on my machine.

I wish I could be excited about that, but because the iPod and iTunes don't support FLAC I have to maintain duplicate, MP3-encoded copies of all of my FLAC-encoded files, and I don't want the duplicates cluttering up my Rhythmbox library.

So, sticking with iTunes via WinXP in VirtualBox here, sadly.

Don't try to upgrade an iPhone this way though: you will lock it up and will have to restore it via Windows running natively.

I've successfully upgraded my first-gen iPhone through VirtualBox several times.

You just have to babysit it and re-enable the device in the USB list after each time it restarts.

I had an issue with an iPhone 3G upgrading from 3.1.2. to 3.1.3. After iTunes did its thing to put it in a mode where it was ready to accept the new image, Ubuntu refused to see it as a USB device. May have been a fluke, but I'm not trying it that way again.

You'll love this:

MP3FS is A read-only FUSE filesystem which transcodes audio formats (currently FLAC) to MP3 on the fly when opened and read. This was written to enable me to use my FLAC collection with software and/or hardware which only understands MP3. e.g. gmediaserver to a netgear MP101 mp3 player.

http://mp3fs.sourceforge.net/

I have a ~/mp3_music directory which provides an exact duplicate of ~/music except for transcoding non-mp3 audio files on read. It's seriously kickass.

Yup, you (and the author) just made my day. Thanks!

Will it do that without breaking an existing sync connection to iTunes?

Except it doesn't actually rebuild the itunes db on the phone when you add new music to it, right?

I'm not sure what you mean by "rebuild the itunes db." The songs show up in the Itunes player on the Iphone as soon as they are loaded.

Great! Earlier versions would place the mp3s on the iPhone but they would not show up in iTunes which made it useless.

Just tried it with a first gen not-jailbroken iPod Touch. Worked beautifuly, with cover art auto-downloaded by Rythmbox and all.

I'll go as far as saying the experience is WAY better with Rythmbox then using iTunes.

My relationship with Ubuntu is always the same:

  1. A release of Ubuntu comes out. Hey, this sounds cool.
  2. I download a live CD and try it out.
  3. I realize it is in fact pretty cool, really fast, very full-featured.
  4. It critically fails to support some essential piece of hardware.
  5. I go back to OS X and the cycle repeats a few releases later.

The fatal flaw in this release: My trackpad dies every time I sleep my MacBook Pro.

Waging a wild guess, Mac hardware isn't the easiest to support. I don't think Apple is cooperating?

This trackpad isn't all that special. Ubuntu supports it (right down to the two-finger gestures) — it just supports it in a buggy way.

At any rate, I could buy pretty much any laptop and we could make a similar excuse when something goes wrong. "That piece of hardware that isn't working isn't the easiest to support. I don't think the manufacturer is cooperating." It might be true in a given case or it might not, but like all excuses, it doesn't change the fact that I can't use my extremely common model of laptop with Ubuntu.

If Ubuntu wants to rely on that excuse (and that's not too bad — Apple does), it needs to set up a project to provide clear compatibility guidelines. "It works with these computers. It doesn't work with these others. Set your expectations accordingly." Because as it is now, the implicit guideline is, "You can't really expect it work 100% on any mainstream laptop."

My biggest gripe with the new theme is the taskbar. I confuse which window has the focus. It seems to me that the colors should be inversed.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that. I've have several times where I thought I was switching applications only to minimize an active window due to the "inverse" colors.

Oh dear, I still have a server on 8.04 and a desktop with 9.04. I'm falling behind the times, it seems, but I'm too paranoid about doing something to kmail to upgrade. the server, well, I'm too paranoid about doing something to anything to upgrade that.

I upgraded from dapper to jaunty 8 months ago with repeated edits to sources.list and dist-upgrades. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

In my experience, `do-release-upgrade` works seamlessly and you shouldn't fear upgrading. It's part of the upgrade-manager-core package.

You've been lucky. Every single computer I updated to 9.10 would not boot initially. I had to spend hours on each one resolving the problems.

Actually, what would best describe it is that you have been terribly unlucky.

Every single computer I installed Ubuntu, since the 6.x releases, has worked flawlessly with one exception - an IBM desktop that has a buggy HDD controller that requires some time to properly boot. One line in grub and it was solved.

And that was it. The only glitch I ever had installing Ubuntu.

I've had a couple of problems here and there with configurations.

The worst one was my fault : I edited my crontab on ym home machine, and sent it by sftp to the server and put it in /etc. Everything was fine, until a week later I did a routine aptitude upgrade.... and then I woke up to find out my cronjobs hadn't been running for the past 9 hours.

This could be like a riddle! But well, what happened is I had non-root ownership on the crontab. When cron restarted, it saw this, logged an error and refused to budge another inch.

I've had a few other configuration related errors, to. We run a pretty tight company (in terms of, no time to do anything extra) and so I'm wary of inadvertently changing some vital configuration that I haven't thought of in a year or two.

You should do backups.

I am very grateful and supportive to Ubuntu but this thing of the six months release has always been a pain in the neck. I switched to Arch a year ago and never looked back. Now I have the latest version of all softwares, always.

Do you know why Ubuntu goes for `batch-releases'?

Officially because they should be testing the version before distributing it. The main advantage of batch-releases to my eyes is that every 6 months there is a lot of fuzz and media attention, which is very good to draw new users - so, very welcome.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases

Thanks. They explain "Ubuntu releases on a time based cycle, rather than a feature driven one."--but they seem to ignore the possibility of continuous updates.

Last time I used Arch, they had just moved to libjpeg7, which removed libjpeg6 and immediately broke a small army of programs that still required 6.

The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

Suddenly, a 6 month release cycle didn't seem like such a bad thing.

> The recourse for users was to manually manage a copy of libjpeg6 themselves, outside of the package manager.

That was because you did an upgrade from a mirror in which not all packages where updated. Bad luck.

No. The packages themselves weren't up to date, it wasn't just the mirror failing to fetch the new ones. Hence threads like this one (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=585808) with suggestions like "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7."

I didn't do an "upgrade". It was a first-time fresh install.

> "[t]ry to persuade the creators of the binaries to rebuild against libjpeg-7."

Would a source-distribution like Gentoo get around those problems?

Yes, as long as there were no compile-time errors because of changes from libjpeg6 to libjpeg7.

I see. I remember when libjpeg-7 were introduced some people had problems either with async mirrors or they forgot to rebuild packages in AUR. Yours was a particularly unfortunate case, sorry it happened at your first experience with ARCH. I'd suggest you try again sooner or later. It's a nice distro, really.

I have been tempted to try again, and I can accept the idea that I just hit things at the exact wrong time.

At this point, the main roadblock to trying Arch again hasn't been that past experience, but rather a very high level of satisfaction with Ubuntu 10.04.

Curiosity will get me to take a stab at Arch again, but I really like what Ubuntu is doing on the design/integration side of things.

There are a few things I don't like about Arch, but I definitely agree that a rolling release is preferable to six-month-cycles. I've been using Debian testing for a few months now instead of Ubuntu and it's gone pretty smoothly.

I liked the idea of the rolling release, which is one of the reasons I was trying Arch in the first place. (And I was a Gentoo user before Ubuntu came along).

But it's got to "roll" a little smoother than that. I understand some potholes here and there, but that was a sinkhole.

In Arch, there is never a reason to "manually manage a copy outside the package manager". You can and should install everything via PKGBUILDs -- the format isn't very hard, just keep a template around, fill in the metadata, and make tweaks to the commands to run if necessary. Then everything is always kept in pacman and easy to find and/or remove.

You don't even have to do this; there was a PKGBUILD added to AUR, so all you had to do in this (and most) cases is download the PKGBUILD from AUR or use something like yaourt or clyde that does this automatically.

For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6.

And despite Arch's rolling release cycle, I still have much less pain with it than I do with Ubuntu's custom-hybrid-half-versions, based on a release already 4-months-old, with about half of the changes in the newer versions backported, and including handfuls of patches never added upstream. See the Debian SSL fiasco for why this is a bad idea. The system is much feistier than Arch in my experience, even though Arch will occasionally perform upgrades that necessitate lots of rebuilds.

>> "For me, the problems were fixed with a simple yaourt -S libjpeg6."

Which makes it all the more disappointing that all I could find were needlessly complex solutions instead.

yaourt looks very helpful. Seeing it listed as the 20th "AUR Helper" (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_Helpers) didn't exactly make it jump out at me and scream, "this is what you want!"

Is anyone aware if the left-justified max/min/close buttons are still left-justified, or if that was corrected? There was an article about a month ago discussing this (and its inherent silliness) but I'm not sure if it still exists as such.

Looking at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand seems to indicate that it still is, and perhaps as trivial as this may seem, it is discouraging me from upgrading.

(edit) I haven't yet had a chance to download a live CD of a release candidate.

They are still left-justified, but they fixed the horrible padding they had in one of the beta releases.

I'm basically used to them, but kind of annoying that my primary app in Ubuntu (Chrome) has them on the right side, as it creates inconsistency. Yes, I realize I can use the native title bar with Chrome but then it's not as pretty ;-)

The info is appreciated. Is there any means by which to set it back to "normal", so to speak, using themes or other customization features?

Some of the other themes in System -> Preferences -> Appearance have the buttons on the right side. For example, select "Clearlooks" as your theme and the buttons will go to the right. Ambiance, Dust, and Radiance have the buttons on the left. New Wave, Clearlooks, Dust Sand, and the high-contrast options are on the right.

This was a change from earlier betas where changing the theme would not change the location of the controls (and, for me, is much appreciated even if I know how to use gconf-editor).

I don't know what it's like on 'standard' Ubuntu (i.e., Gnome) but I found the built in Chrome title bar to be really buggy in KDE. It would snap around and 'stick' to my cursor when resizing or moving, so I had to go with the system title bar.

You can download a Chrome extension/theme to match the Ubuntu one (it's called Ambiance if I recall) and have Chrome use the system window decoration (right click on a free spot in the tabs area). This way Chrome integrates perfectly.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/elnmibmpefhmfgph...

I hop between Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows all the time, so little annoyances like this just fade into the background for me. I can appreciate how this would annoy somebody, though.

Go to System->Preferences->Appearance, there are default installed themes with the buttons in the upper right. It's a 5 second fix.

[edit] I like the new positions, just saying that you can switch it back trivially.

Ah, thanks tons to you as well for the info. That eases my slightly-neurotic worry a lot :)

Mhh, i just tried that. Although the thumbnails show the controls on the right side, i didn't get it to work. Regardless of the theme selected the controls remains on the left side :(

Most of them don't, but Clearlooks works.

They are, but you can move them back very easily with gconf-editor. Change /apps/metacity/general/button_layout to "menu:minimize,maximize,close" as described here:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-bac...

Fix:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-bac...

Luckily, this is easy to fix, just:

run gconf-editor then,

Change apps -> metacity -> general -> button_layout to ':minimize,maximize,close' without quotes

If you turn visual effects on/off, you're back to the original settings though.

Woah, thanks! This is probably the last thing that i found disturbing in the new release, great!

gconftool -s /apps/metacity/general/button_layout -t string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

Ubuntu.com could use some work. "What's new?" link on the front or tour/product pages would be a good start, even if it's a LTS release.

I am downloading the ISO right now - I have a new hardware laptop that I have had problems getting wireless working, and I have happy expectations that 10.04 will recognize my hardware. It helps a lot to not buy the latest hardware to give the Linux community time to get drivers. Lesson learned.

Sweet: I got my wireless working even before updating: Realtek had a new Linux driver available on their site :-)

Last week only I downloaded the RC version of Ubuntu 10.04. Quite happy!! Mac inspired design :) I am running in Virtual Box apart from resolution I didn't face much difficulties going smooth!! though I m not using much feature apart from learning Ruby & RoR...

Anyone know if the MD5 hashes are available for the 10.04 ISO's to check them?

Here are the ones from the iso's I downloaded

    d044a2a0c8103fc3e5b7e18b0f7de1c8  ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso

    3e0f72becd63cad79bf784ac2b34b448  ubuntu-10.04-desktop-amd64.iso

http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04/MD5SUMS

From the announcement (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2010-April...): "Users of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS may wish to wait for 10.04.1 LTS, due in July 2010, before upgrading."

Anyone know why? Surely we're not adopting the 'wait for service pack 1' approach?

It's just about the LTS -- whether that's for IT governance issues or the desire for warm fuzzies. The LTS release is meant to be essentially no-touch for 3 years, so it won't be stamped "gold" until there is a significant public deployment of the normal stable release and time for bug testing in real-world user hands.

Ubuntu's homepage still lists this as an RC.

They probably have to stage the iso's and everything on the servers. So we can probably pull the final images down before it's announced for a couple hours.

Don't forget to contribute to bittorrent with your iso afterwards.

In fact, don't download over http, just use bittorrent. Leave http for people who don't know how to use bittorrent or otherwise can't (firewall restrictions).

Do you know whether you can use something like bittorrent for the upgrade as well?

This link is a little old and I haven't tried it, but here you go:

http://torrentfreak.com/use-bittorrent-to-upgrade-to-ubuntu-...

Previously they had -rc in the filename.

I'm thinking of getting the Pangolin Performance from System76, any thoughts?

I am very happy with the Serval (v3) I've been using for about two and a half years.

A great resource for evaluating the available models and gauging customer response is the official support forum: http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=341

Feel free to enter your own call for feedback by posting your requirements and expectations and a request for opinions.

thanks

Been looking at the UltraThin myself.

Just downloaded the amd64 version (from The Netherlands). It's very strange, it looks like this is not a bootable CD.

It's more like an autorun CD with Wubi. Anyone else got the same problem?

(downloading it as torrent right now)

The Live CD wasn't working for me but then I realised I downloaded the amd64-alternate version not the amd64-desktop version. The desktop version is a LiveCD whereas the alternate version is not. Don't know if the same applies to you.

It is a bootable livecd and an autorun wubi cd at the same time.

Hate the dark theme. Feels like a skinned desktop from the nineties.

Changed to a light theme which looks ok but like the same I used in the last 10 years...

When will I install an Ubuntu that doesn't make me feel so "Oh this is still Linux"...

Also, why isn't VLC the default video player yet?

Hm, it was quite easy to install more window borders. If only I could get fonts to look like Windows...

I raged against the fonts for a long time, but I actually prefer the Gnome ones now. You might grow to love them. You probably do want the fonts from Windows though (just put them in ~/.fonts)

Window borders as in colours? Or window borders for resizing & moving? Alt-L/M/R is much more usable. I reassigned to Win-L/M/R also.

Is there a "What is new in 10.4" kind of article?

Ugh the world is against me today. I'm at work, got the iso, can't find a USB key to install the new version on my netbook, fingers crossed this version actually boots. O well, 2 hrs till the desktop upgrade completes. EXCITEMENT!

upgrading as we speek

Woot finally

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