Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

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The link is here the image download page, which doesn't provide much context.

Release Announcement:

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

Release Notes:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1010

Upgrade Info:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

Desktop Overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop

Server Overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/server

Netbook Overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook

I installed it from CD in a friend's PC. Couple of little complaints: he was confused by the installation screen showing that he didn't have the requirement of "2.6 GB of available drive space": http://lh6.ggpht.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TH7Lkl4Jd-I/AAAAAAAAByc/tt...

He thought this was because there was another OS in the drive and didn't know how to proceed (the "Forward" button was grayed out). I took a look at it, suspected no hard drive detected and that was it, the newly install HD had no power attached to it.

I just wished (for the newbies' sake) that instead/besides the disk space requirement with an X there was a note saying that no HD was detected.

The second issue is that even if I chose "yes, install proprietary stuff" the WiFi card wasn't working because of missing firmware (at least the message was right there when clicking on the network icon -strange up/down arrows btw-).

It took me only a few minutes to figure out and find the firmware update submenu and solve the issue but they could have linked that in the wifi connection message; my friend (someone with no experience outside Windows) would have not solved this issue by himself.

what/where is the firmware submenu? I have WIFI issues after fresh install too.

System | Administration | Additional Drivers

I am surprised at how well their servers are handling this. I am using the standard method of updating from the update manager and I am getting over 1 Mbit/s speeds.

So if you were waiting for the crowd to clear, no need to wait.

How long did your upgrade take?

The download part was no longer than 30 min. I am not sure how long the entire upgrade took because I left my computer and the upgrade stopped at one part because it needed to ask me a question.

I hate that - I wish someone could come up with a way to either front-load or back-load the prompts that interrupt the install.

The upgrade alone took 3 hours on my laptop, and that ballooned to 5+ from it getting hung up on prompts.

There's a way to do that, but it's mostly useful for deploying a large amount of machines,ie, if you don't use something like cloning machines:

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

yes |

Interesting. My entire upgrade took 52 minutes, and only had two prompts. Two more than I'd like, but two compared to the 20 someodd I used to get is great.

Boring, obvious advice from someone who's been using Kubuntu since Feisty: if it's your main desktop, don't upgrade now unless you have to. For the sake of a couple of weeks' waiting you stand a much better chance of avoiding any teething troubles, or at least being able to to find documentation for your problem. This is especially relevant if you use a laptop or unusual hardware.

(For the record I've been hit with laptop wifi incompatibility (the Intel wireless driver got changed, config files didn't update) and software RAID in the GRUB 2 update.)

For anyone unfamiliar with it, many wifi issues can be taken care of with a little research and the compat-wireless (http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download) downloads. Very easy to patch in the latest drivers for your chipset.

Second that. Unless there's something major you just can't live without, which there doesn't appear to be in the upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10, let the pawns go first.

Clever that Ubuntu 10.10 is released on 10/10/10.

That's how their version numbers work - 9.10 was released in October 09, 9.04 in April 09, etc.

i don't think that the case. The first number is the year and the second is the month.

Isn't that what he was implying?

Yes, but in previous years, it was on the 30th of the month that the release happened. This year it was on the 10th of the month so 10.10 could be year.month or month.day.

They broke with tradition slightly to celebrate the day.

I want to upvote this, but then it would go past 10 upvotes.

> The Ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is... 42, and in its' purest form 101010.

Source: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2010-Octob...

Unless I'm seeing some leftovers from the beta/rc, I think the default theme still ships with a nearly impossible to grab window border, which is somewhat infuriating.

Usually i use shiki themes and elementary from time to time. They all have the same issue. I think that's metacity perk and not theme related. Recently I became switched to LXDE (try it on High Performance PC - Mind blown) and i don't have that problem as openbox has nice borders and handles.

You can make borders as thick as you like. The "1px border" disease is a theme design problem.

It wouldn't matter if bottom-right resize handles were standard, but as it is only a few windows have them.

Try holding down <Alt> and middle clicking anywhere near the window corner, I find that far faster than trying to grab any kind of corner or side, and I get frustrated when I have to use an OS (eg. Windows) that doesn't support this.

I know that frustration. I catch myself trying to do that in Windows all the time.

No, you're seeing it correctly. I was of the (apparently minority) opinion that they had really dropped the ball with the new theme introduced in 10.04.

That one release later still suffers from blatant UI screwups like that is really disappointing.

It's a pretty stupid bug to ship with, I'd easily call it a showstopper.

Step 1. Hold Alt key and middle drag anywhere in the window to start resizing it.

Step 2. Stop caring that you can even resize a window by left dragging on tiny little corners.

It's less about me and more about people that don't know about shortcuts like this.

Usually I do not grab borders in GNOME. I use Alt-Button1 to move and Alt-Button3 to resize (alternatively Alt-F7 or Alt-F8).

You don't have much of a choice if you're using the default theme.

The long term fix for the issue of window resizing being difficult (unless you use Alt + Button2) has only just landed in GTK+ 3 master:

http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/mclasen/2010/10/09/getting...

It makes it possible to implement an easy to grab window handle in every GtkWindow regardless of whether it uses a status bar, among other things.

Hasn't this been a bug for years? I think it has something to do with the core theming system making it difficult/impossible to do, so while it appears to be a minor bug it's actually a very deep problem.

Or possibly so many developers are just used to using ALT-button 2 that it isn't a pain point for them.

I just installed 10.10 on my netbook, and the user interface has been completely redone... again. I am happy that Canonical are working so much on UI, but I wish they would stick to a basic layout for a while and improve it until it is solid and all the details are right. It will never be just right if they keep throwing it all out every six months for something new. I am having some serious problems figuring out how to start applications and whether buttons open new windows or switch to current ones.

On the plus side, it hasn't broken anything major. Wireless just works.

Ubuntu's Software Center == Apple's iTunes Store. Making it as easy is a huge opportunity for Ubuntu. Looking forward to giving it a shot.

Well if Apple actually used unified updates... But yes it's very nice compared to what it used to be. I feel comfortable having people use it now.

When I updated Ubuntu in VirtualBox, I got X-Windows completely broken. This helped:

"If you are testing Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat in VirtualBox, you may notice that guest additions are not working, it seems that the problem is the new xserver they put in Ubuntu 10.10, the modules are not build against this new version."

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
  sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11

http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/1157-install-guest-ad...

There appear to still be serious issues with both the proprietary Nvidia and ATI drivers with Xorg 1.9 - kind of a shame. If you have an older Nvidia card, or an ATI card plus certain monitors, you're not going to be able to use the good drivers with 10.10 for awhile.

Is that with the ubuntu supplied drivers or the nvidia ones?

Everything is working well for me with the latest nvidia drivers (256.53) on a GTX 260 card.

According to the release notes, nvidia-96 and nvidia-173 are the ones with the issue.

i've run into this issue after upgrading--cpu usage is high and graphics rendering is slow. after disabling the proprietary nvidia driver everything went back to normal.

there's a beta nvidia driver that claims to fix some of the problems, i'm trying it now: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1577997

released on 10/10/10. cool.

Not only that, but also at 10:10 UTC

Is it just me, or are there no release notes?

It was linked to in the release email at least: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1010

Thank you! It was missing on the page.

Makes sense - things like gconf and dsettings are fr developers, not end users. The main page has a what's new, I believe, which covers more common interests.

Well, known issues with installation do belong on the page targeted at users, I think. At least as a link.

I have a Lenovo Ideapad S10 which has been running 10.04 since April and I've been pretty happy with it. I imagine that I will install 10.10 on it tomorrow.

Not sure what the Ideapads use for wifi, but there is an issue with the iwlagn driver (what my Thinkpad X61 uses) that disables 802.11n modes. Not a problem if you're using not using 802.11n, but something to be aware of. Check the release notes for details.

The original S10 has an Atheros chip (non-N)

I'll also be throwing this onto my OS-of-the-week S10 (I was trying to get Plan 9 running, but it wasn't having any of it)

I really like Plan 9. Too bad it never really took off.

My IdeaPad S10 uses a Broadcom BCM4312.

I hoped they would manage to make my wireless card work wirelessly. They didn't :(

I'm not the one that downvoted you, but I think that you could have at least mentioned the model of the wireless card, not to mention a `lspci -v' dump or a real bug report.

The reason I didn't add any more info is because I don't use HN to fix my network problems. I have posted the question on ubuntuforums.org and I am still awaiting a reply.

http://askubuntu.com/

How can i update to the newest version from the 10.10 release candidate?

System → Administration → Update Manager should do it, if you're using the GUI; if not, try the usual "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade".

The correct way to upgrade Ubuntu from the command line is "do-release-upgrade" (which includes extra upgrading smarts that apt alone does not).

Why doesn't the apt-get man page mention this? It is getting rather difficult keeping track of what the current recommended way is.

More info: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade , https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/installing-upgra...

We're talking about upgrading from the 10.10 release candidate to 10.10 final, right? That shouldn't require "do-release-upgrade", surely.

Yes, avoid dist-upgrade, it apparently can break dependencies. Upgrade to a major version with

%> sudo apt-get update && sudo do-release-upgrade

> To upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a server system: install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=normal; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d; and follow the on-screen instructions.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/ReleaseNotes

If you're upgrading a server, just run "do-release-upgrade -m server".

10.10 doesn't provide much over 10.04 for a server, so people should wait maybe? I installed the 10.10 RC a little while ago on my primary machine but I am on 9.04, 9.10 and 10.04 on various other machines.

Yeah, I'd strongly recommend sticking with 10.04 LTS for any production servers -- unless you require a particular and/or peculiar feature in 10.10, that is.

LTS == Long Term Support == security fixes for 5 years. :-)

Except upgrading incrementally if you can is easier. Less things to change all at once.

Best of both worlds for server - upgrade from LTS version to LTS version only, skip the 'bleeding edge' *.10 releases.

Of course, plenty of people are still running 7, 8, and 9 servers with no problems.

If you have the 10.10 RC already, I'm pretty sure there's no "upgrade" to the final as if you were coming from 10.04 - the updates you've been applying along the way have put you there.

Anyone going for Kubuntu?

I actually switched from Kubuntu to Ubuntu just for the sake of change. Only thing I miss is split view in Nautilus, although it seems there are patches available.

You'll be pleased to find that Nautilus in 10.10 has a split pane view. Just hit View > Extra Pane (or F3). :-)

10.04 here... split panes work great.

Actually installed Xubuntu on a netbook (old hp 2133).

Torrents:

64 bit: http://burnbit.com/torrent/156840/ubuntu_10_10_desktop_amd64...

32 bit: http://burnbit.com/torrent/156841/ubuntu_10_10_desktop_i386_...

Please seed

I'm not an expert in BitTorrent, but in my mental model, aren't you siphoning away seeders from the _official_ Ubuntu trackers by using burnbit?

I can appreciate using burnbit for certain behemoth companies that don't normally publish via torrent, but since ubuntu.com actually offers them along-side the isos, this smells counterproductive.

I think uTorrent does not even connect to web seeds unless there are low seeds/peers

In this case yes. The torrent file from burnbit appears to list only the burnbit tracker.

A torrent file can list multiple trackers. It would make more sense for burnbit to take the official torrent and add their tracker to the list, allowing a client to make use of the peers listed by their tracker and the official tracker.

The offical torrent provides both IPv6 and IPv4 trackers, which is nice.

Official torrent downloads: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/alternative-downloa...

Getting [k]ubuntu upgrades is about the only thing I've used torrents for seriously - it always takes far far longer than a direct download from one of my nearest mirrors. Like 24hrs instead of 1.

I'm not leeching I get lots of connections it just goes slow as molasses. Guess I'm doing it wrong but just in case others are getting slow downloads via torrent I'd really consider a direct download.

Actually with me it's exactly the opposite, I usually saturate the connection, download the iso and let it seed for a few days or so. Do you encounter the same issue with other torrents? Your connection might be getting throttled or your router is not able to handle all the peers.

I'm only peering with about 30-40 others. Throttling is possible but it's the same now after an ISP (and router) change. Not the forum for it, just thought people may not realise that a slow torrent doesn't necessarily mean that a direct dl would be slow.

Edit: Just tried latest Kubuntu torrent and let it settle for five mins, so far I'm on 1day 20hours remaining after bringing it down from 4days by adding a web seed. o_O . It is working, downloading and uploading, picking up and dropping peers etc..

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