Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Beta 1, Released | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Beta 1, Released

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114 pointshotice66 comments

OMGUbuntu have a (fairly similar) review: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/ubuntu-11-10-beta-release...

The offical Ubuntu site has more juicy details: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta...

Looks like most of this release is about tweaking Unity. I was really excited about it at first, but I switched back to classic Gnome after three months. The extra screen space is nice, but it was too easy to lose my bearings.

I got used to it after a couple days. My home computer runs Unity while my desktop at work runs classic Gnome (with 10.10 - I'm waiting for 11.10)

My biggest complaint is that Unity took all my super bindings from Emacs. I had to do a lot of remapping for it to work on both machines.

Just change the hotkey for the Unity panel - in the compiz plugin configuration, the Unity plugin.

But then I'd have to manage custom bindings for both Emacs and Unity. It was easier to avoid collisions in Emacs and let Unity use Super for whatever it wants (which is useful, BTW)

I found that Unity doesn't like Super+R or whatever other combination you enter. It doesn't always seem to "catch" the combination.

That was the deal breaker, Ubuntu is just a library that Emacs use to communicate with the hardware.

I really like Unity, but neither it nor Compiz play well with Xinerama (at least on 11.04). So while I was using Twinview with two monitors, Unity was great. However, as soon as I switched to three monitors across two vid cards, I had to drop Unity/Compiz and switch back to vanilla gnome. I'm hoping this release will resolve that issue.

Well, that and the sorta crazy window behavior. I think Unity is more intuitive than OS X regarding window management except for one "feature"...when you have multiple windows of the same application and then click the Launcher to restore one, it restores and brings to the front all of the windows. This is really bad design...I often have many terminals open and want to view a browser beside one of those terminals, but Unity makes it a real pain to do so, because every time I bring one term to the front, they all come along.

A better sensible default would be to bring to the front only the ones that are in _that_ workspace, a second click (in case you didn't find what you are looking for with the first one) would bring to the front all the windows belonging to that app (current behaviour).

Hm, for me it did not work well even on two monitors.

I'll give this one a try, hopefully they fixed it.

I use Ubuntu Unity daily (both at work and at home), and still find myself lost when trying to navigate between open windows.

For me there was an issue with the fact that most of my work apps aren't standard and didn't cooperate with the hijacked toolbar. If I'm going to use a distro that prides itself on ease of use, I'm not going to bother with any additional configuration just to have a toolbar in Intellij and Spring Tool Suite. No clue if this has been remedied at all yet. My dance with Unity lasted only a week before I just removed it and went to Linux Mint.

> We had to revert from unity-window-decorator to gtk-window-decorator for performance reasons. This means that the "1 px border" for resizing window is back temporarily.

I hope "temporarily" doesn't mean until 12.04

I hope this means my brand new laptop with a Core i5, 8GB of Ram and an SSD will now have the performance to run the standard bloody desktop. I'm currently using the classic desktop on 11.04 because my laptop starts crawling on Unity after short periods.

I run Unity on a netbook with 1GB of ram - and since all I run is vim, chrome and a few terminals, I don't see any problems. But, your mileage may vary

Yes, some people have no problems. But the performance issues with Unity on 11.04 are well known and wide spread.

FWIW, all I usually have running is Thunderbird, Instantbird, Firefox and some terminals, and since switching back to classic I haven't had any performance issues.

Did you try unity-2d?

Nope. I ran with plain Unity for the best part of a week and found it didn't give anything of value over the classic interface. The performance issues forced me back to the classic interface though. Not had any performance issues with classic.

I'll give Unity another go when I upgrade to 11.10 in January (3 month delay gives them time to fix the worse bugs). I'm not spending my time trying to make it work nicely if I can just fall back to classic to fix things.

if you have got the sandy bridge processor, do NOT give into increased-graphics-performance temptation and upgrade to the 3.1 kernel.

There is a 76% power regression vs 2.6.3x kernels http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux...

Thanks for the info. This does affect me. I'll be sticking to 2.6.38 until they sort these issues out.

You can always download and install the latest kernels while keeping the older versions as backup. No need to worry about GRUB settings either as that's all handled when you install the kernel debian packages.

Only caveat to this is you might have to reinstall your graphics driver for the new kernel.

Most likely yes. I run 11.04 with Unity on an 1.5 GB Intel Atom-based netbook and have no problem with it. I find the extra screen space specially nice when I am mobile, but also welcome when I am hoked up to a large screen.

That's strange.

I had 11.04 on an old, battered machine (Athlon 2500+, 768 MB RAM, Radeon 9600) for about a week and it worked OK. Scratch that, I had no performance issues at all. The only reason I installed xubuntu on it was that after I'd disabled Zeitgeist (a passive logger that tracks everything you do, every site you visit, and your online communication) the dash went empty.

Unity looks great, but I don't like that there's no easy way to configure it. I would surely like to move the launcher to the bottom and make it auto-hide automatically even on a desktop with no running apps.

I know they are still experimenting, but I think they've confused innovation with copying tablet specific features. Take as an example the position of the launcher. It's perfect if you're working on a tablet with touch screen, but on desktop its position is a bit strange. Maybe that's just my preference, but the "natural" position for it on desktop would be the bottom of the screen.

Do you have a reason for the bottom being the 'natural' position that isn't 'Apple puts it there by default'?

I don't know exactly why, but my mouse tends to be in the lower right corner of the screen most of the time. Considering that, launching an app from the bottom of the screen involves less work for me. I'm not sure if that's true for the rest of the people or it is just my thing.

Elementary OS Jupiter might seem more 'natural' until Unity configuration is sorted

Does anyone know if it will do any good for the dual gfx card laptops? These new acer series laptops have two graphics cards on them. One is the intel on board and one is the nVidia G-Force. It uses a technology called nvidia optimus to select one of them according to need. But Linux seems plain confused and always uses both the cards I think. Thus on windows laptops run for 4:30hr with everything turned on and it is just under 2 hours for linux.

Optimus requires driver support to perform the switching, which so far nVidia has refused to even think of adding for Linux. Since their drivers are closed, there's not much more that can be done. It's possible that support might eventually make it into nouveau, the open-source NV driver, but it's not there now.

(On top of that there are some bits of X that need to be rewritten to be able to fully take advantage of card switching conveniently, but last I heard people were working on it.)

If power is your concern, most BIOSes will let you disable the nVidia card and force everything through the Intel hardware. But the obvious downside to this is you never get to use your fancy graphics hardware.

I never use it anyway except for rare occasions like some games in which case I have to switch to windows anyway. But I don't see the option to switch the thing off.

This was actually enough for me to avoid buying an Optimus equipped netbook I had my eyes on... :(

In an nVidia Optimus configuration, there is no actual switching between the IGP and GPU. The LCD display is connected only to the IGP. The discrete GPU is connected only to the PCIe bus. Therefore to display anything from the GPU, the contents of the GPU framebuffer RAM need to be copied over the PCIe bus to the main RAM and displayed using the IGP. The Windows drivers use "Microsoft detours" in the Display Driver Interposer to seamlessly direct graphics API calls from applications to the IGP or discrete GPU.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/LO_optimus_whitepapers.html

By turning off Optimus in BIOS I was able to get main graphics working in my work laptop, but there seems to be absolutely no way to enable external monitors for now. If you can just get normal Intel graphics, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble.

You need a newer kernel with gpu switching support and in some cases might need to play around with kernel command line parameters or scripts to power down the unused GPU. Google for it.

In general though I avoid running Nvidia GPU under Linux.

You can try using Bumblebee[1] or Ironhide[2], as they seem to be coming along fairly well.

[1] https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee [2] http://www.martin-juhl.dk/2011/08/ironhide-reporting-for-dut...

Bumblebee did show some improvement but even if I use bumblebee-disablecard the powertop program still reports 18.7Wh drain of battery. In windows it is about 12-13. Difference of about an hour.

Will try ironhide.

No sign of fixes for the various bugs that cause Sandy Bridge systems to crash on suspend/hibernate and at random times, and adds an extra power regression: the self-destruct button has been expanded to more systems: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/837266

Isn't that a kernel bug and not a Ubuntu bug?

Can someone explain to me exactly what the advantage is of hiding the menu bar contents behind mouseover?

Something like 28800 pixels on typical monitors these days?

Putting it that way without mentioning that it's only 1.4% of the 2073600 pixels available on those same displays is a bit misleading, don't you think?

It's a much higher fraction of the vertical space available though, which is terribly underprovisioned on modern displays. We're all trying to scroll vertical text content on a screen intended for watching movies, and it sucks.

I haven't had a chance to actually try this yet, but it looks great from the shots. Gnome 3 is doing similar things with hot corners and I like that too.

Looks less cluttered? It is a design decision so you're not going to get a universally accepted answer.

There is a specific answer -- the designers must have thought it had specific advantages over the previous behavior. Whether these advantages exist and are worth it can be argued about, but they hopefully had something in mind! :)

So programs will make their basic functionality more discoverable instead of hiding it in the menus? And when only less-used functions are relegated to the menus, there's not much point in having them visible all the time. There will be a larger contrast between common, discoverable functions and rare, hidden-away ones.

It's good for netbooks. That being said, I've got 11.04 running unity on the mother of all netbooks, the original eeePC 7". I click on the application finder and it is too large to show the search box on-screen - there's no intelligence; instead of showing one line of icons and the search box, it shows the stock two lines and kicks the search box offscreen.

I have unity on a VM on a 1920x1200 screen as well. Here I have a lot of screen-estate... and the interface is too small, really. On such a large screen, when I want to interact with it, it's too much out of the way.

So, in my experience, unity isn't for large or small screens.

Seems to be lots of love for Unity here. Where are my haters at?

I'd rather punch myself in the eye than use Unity. First thing I did was switch back to classic Gnome.

I think Linux Mint is heading in the right direction with Gnome. Also been thinking about switching to Xfce since I've been using the CL a lot more.

I'm using an embarassingly old Ubuntu release on my main machine and Unity on a test machine.

I've really tried to like Unity but I simply hate it. The machine I'm using doesn't show that many bugs. I'm patient with bugs - they'll fix them, they fixed them in the older release. It's not that.

The bar side is OK-to-mediocre but the lack of a main-menu/start-menu completely crocks the thing. WTF. I can't find my apps, the apps I have installed. I've looked quite a bit. WTF were they thinking? Their particular search thingy sucks but that's not the point - even if it was great, I'd also need to know the stuff that is "just there". Sure, maybe I am an idiot for not knowing the names of the obscure graphics program I just installed and want to use but I don't think I'm the only idiot with this problem and other interfaces are forgiving for us idiots.

It seems like there are two kinds of users that wouldn't be bothered by Unity. Those who only use the browser or about two-three GUIs and those who only use the command line.

For all I know, these might a majority but as a former Windows power user, I suspect that there's an important minority of Ubuntu users and potential Ubuntu who'd like to use a wide variety the existing Linux GUI. Ubuntu has essentially excluded us.

And its not just that Windows/GUI "power users" are a fair share of Ubuntu users but that I think we'd be the best ambassadors/evangelists if Ubuntu is to get off the ground - those who use the OS as only a launchpad to start a browser won't have a strong opinion and the average person isn't going emulate those ten terminals to get their work done.

I can see the "everything slightly confusing must be destroyed" ethos leading to an "OS" consisting of a brightly color candy-machine interface with two buttons, "browser" and "off". No one will be confused but it will still suck.

I agree with everything you said. The whole point behind technology should be accessibility for everyone. Geeks (guilty myself) tend to get into a bubble where we forget about the rest of the world. And there's just something about the Hacker mindset (which most people on HN have) where there more complicated it is, the cooler it seems. Instead of having the mindset of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.", Geeks/Hackers tend to think "If it ain't broke, lets break it!!!"

Linux Mint is based upon Ubuntu/Debian. Give it a try. If you're a Windows power user you'll probably really like it. And all the commands you learned in Boontoo will work in Mint.

A while back Ubuntu had a media release where they said they were simplifying the UI for use by normal folks, and that yes, if you're a power user, Ubuntu may not appeal to you in future, and that you'll probably want a different distro.

The bit I find bizarre is that they've stripped out a lot of small-but-very-useful sysadmin tools. I hate having to troubleshoot on my 11.04 VM as it invariably means having to apt-get install some random tiny cli tool that most distros include, including older ubuntu.

I was a big fun of ubuntu, and used it on my desktops and laptops, but in last few years Skype became a major tool for me, to communicate with my team, and since there is still no good Skype for Linux, I no longer use ubuntu. On a desktop I use Mac OS, laptop is no longer my central tool, and most of the work from the road I do on my iPad. Thinking to get a book air for long trips, where iPad just can't cut it yet :)

also, unity so far has been a disaster... I know about 5 friends who still use ubuntu, they couldn't use it with unity, and I helped them to get old gnome back. Hopefully unity will gets better, but this change I think was too big and wasn't optional. I think they lost a lot of users because of it.

But I still use ubuntu on some servers of mine.

What are you talking about? You can just apt-get install skype, if you enable the partner repository. Or do you mean to say the linux skype version is not as good? Agree with you on unity.

Use skype (w/ video) on android.

I fully expect Microsoft to drop Skype support for Linux .. or atleast give a seriously stunted binary to get around anti-trust, that I am using Android as my full-on communication tool, including video conferencing.

I see skype-video on the S5PV210 Samsung chipset android tablets already (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwI1c93KqA). Atleast in Asia, you can get resistive 8 inchers with Gingerbread for sub-$200.

I use Skype with video every week on Ubuntu. No problems.

I tried it today morning (by doing an upgrade from 11.04) and the unity panel kept restarting every two seconds.

Don't try it without a backup yet.

Upgrading like that may cause some issues (I had issues upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04) so maybe doing a fresh install would make it work better.

Well I had very similar (or worse) problems when upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04, but when they released the Narwhal, the update went smoothly.

It's quite a difficult task to provide the update facility, last time I checked, Linux Mint recommended doing a full reinstall.

It's interesting how much they want to include Openstack at the moment. On one hand side it is trivial to add the Openstack PPAs and install the new version yourself. On the other current upstream versions are quite far from being usable in a real environment and major redesigns are planned...

Why are they pushing for inclusion out of the box so hard?

Unity stamped over a bunch of my keyboard shortcuts, so I took the opportunity to learn xmonad (with gnome classic) and haven't looked back.

XMonad is great. For anyone who finds it a bit daunting I recommend Bluetile[1]. It's a great introduction to the best window management system I've used (I really miss XMonad on OS X.)

[1] http://www.bluetile.org/

I have a Linux, OS X, and Windows machines on my desk (for doing cross-platform development of Firefox). XMonad is definitely my preferred WM for getting things done. OS X and Windows both have attempts at nice features, but they feel so frustrating to use in comparison.

Lion actually improved that a lot: Fullscreen apps integrated with Spaces gives a large part of what I use X<onad for. If they'd combined that with Windows 7's snapping of windows to half-screen, that would cover 75% of my XMonad usage. It's really a shame that XMonad is Linux-only. (Or that Firefox users expect Windows&OSX ports, depending on your perspective).

I use Sizeup under osx to get window snapping via keyboard shortcuts. It also gives you a set of shortcuts to throw the current window to different desktops.

I run xmonad and was under the impression bluetile had been merged back into xmonad proper... no?

unity is cancer. I loved it when it was just maximus for better screen state on netbooks and a few dashboards... but now, that's a travesty.

it's so wrong that they are adding feature and features to try to 'fix' it. tabs in the bottom, filters on the right... it will became a full window manager on the dashboard soon. just kill it.

i'm happy back to good old debian.

Oddly enough that is what I have done as well. Squeeze is nice and stable with backports for Firefox/Iceweasel and LibreOffice and Gnome.

Then I started fiddling with dwm as a window manager and dmenu as application menu and have not looked back...

i went back to ion3. i missed it and didn't know :)

i'm impressed how much debian and ubuntu are the same after you install the non-free firmware package.

now i'm wondering if ubuntu is giving a lot back to debian or just doing minimal changes. but i promised myself to stay out of distro politics a long time ago

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