Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Final Beta released
lists.ubuntu.com
lists.ubuntu.com
If you scroll down, there are nice tables that describe various upgrades to default and otherwise important packages.
You can browse the complete list for every supported release. Or, you can search for a particular package and set the distribution to "any" to see the latest version available in each release.
Debian has always been my favorite, and currently we use Ubuntu on servers as the OS-packages-as-shipped are more up-to-date; which turns out to be quite important in web-dev-land.
Frankly I dont know what CentOS/Redhat does better then Ubuntu nowadays, apart from selling enterprise stuff like JBoss :)
Ubuntu has great Long Term Support - which is exactly what this is about and the apt package management is far superior to Yum (IMO at least) - Plenty of high profile companies use Ubuntu for servers.
- OpenStack Icehouse - the latest version of OpenStack
- Ceph .78 - Emperor!
- Juju is ready now for production usage, with some goodies here:
- New bundles with quickstart, allowing you to deploy entire workloads in one command. So for example you can do `juju quickstart bundle:mongodb/cluster`, toss in your cloud details, and get a 13 node cluster up and running in about 10 minutes. We also have an entire starter Hadoop Cluster and out of the box deployments for Rails and Django (With node.js on the way).
- Manual provider for Juju, allowing you to deploy what are usually cloud workloads onto any machine with Ubuntu and ssh ... so ... all those fancy deploy commands can fire off to Digital Ocean, Linode, or whatever you have laying around.
- New cloud providers - we now publish regular cloud images in AWS, Azure, HP Cloud, and new this cycle is Joyent.
- Newer MAAS (I don't have the changelog handy)
- Vagrant images - We now publish regular vagrant boxes as part of our release process. We also have a Vagrant box that includes Juju with an LXC provider so you can run a simulated deployment of your servers on your Mac/Windows machines.
- LXC 1.0 for container using folks.
- Speaking of containers, a pretty up to date Docker version this is some work that Paul Tagliamonte is doing in Debian and Ubuntu.
- nginx in main, thanks to the hard work of Thomas Ward. He's maintaining a pretty useful PPA backporting nginx packages for older releases.
- The usual goodies, so version bumps in the kernel, kvm, libvirt, puppet,
If I missed an area let me know!
I think I will upgrade when it is available on Linode.
I am not really that used to build my own packages, but it is something I want to learn. And I didn't know that I could download from another version, I will look into it, thanks ! :)
apt-get build-dep beanstalkd
apt-get source beanstalkd # or in your case, download the newer source-package
cd ./beanstalkd-1.x.x
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc
This will happen as soon as I finish my Ansible playbook to get all my current Ubuntu tweaks and dev env setup implemented so I have a repeatable setup and can safely do a fresh install of my desktop as needed with zero manual work.
Dotfiles alone didn't cut it and VPS provisioning frameworks like Ansible are great examples how desktops could be built as well :-)
Feel free to track the progress at https://github.com/ahtik/dotdotbox
I'll try to keep it as universal as possible so it can be shared and tweaked in collaboration.
I've been thinking about setting up an Ansible script, I've never used it before though. How would this work on a new machine? Is it something you run post-OS install? I want to try it out with Arch Linux.
A playbook contains tasks like installing, removing packages, editing config files etc. The beauty of it is that if done correctly you can run the same playbook over and over again against the same computer and each task can be smart enough to know if it needs to be run or not. This makes updating your computer with the same or updated playbook very fast.
With Ubuntu it's easy to get to the post-OS install, it's more involved with Arch Linux. I would first create an Arch box with Vagrant using Virtualbox. And then create a playbook that works with that virtual Arch box. If the box and ansible playbook is good enough then https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Moving_an_existing_inst...
At least in theory, I haven't moved Arch between VM and a real host myself... Of course you can also just do a manual Arch install and then run the playbook but that would miss half the fun of doing less by doing more.
1) Get the right packages (eg: dpkg --get-selections > my-pacakges.list; dpkg --set-selections < my-packages.list). This part ansible can do fine -- but not really any better than your distributions package tool (for this particular use-case)
2) Set up your account (This can be done with kicstart, FAI or preseed.cfg) If you only have one user, this might not be worth automating. This is also a task ansible can handle fine.
3) Set up your preferences/restore your home folder etc.
This is the area that tends to take the most time and care.
Personally I've pretty much stabilized on a very spartan xmonad config (driven from ~/.xsession), and have a mercurial repo with various dot-files that I just clone and symlink to (and I have a bash-script that takes care of setting up the symlinks) -- I also manually set up a python virtualenv (which bin I add to my path), an ~/opt hierarchy managed by xstow (I usually recreate this, as the whole point is to follow upstream, unpackaged software) and a ~/bin folder that's also in a mercurial repo (a few shell scripts for toggling vga/internal displays for my laptop and some similar small utilities).
Now, "manually" symlinking your dot-files probably isn't the best idea -- the main reason I do it this way, is that I've had to manage my profile across different distributions (and for a time also on Solaris) -- and then just keeping home in version control can be a little to simplistic (now with mercurial/git I suppose using named branches for the various machines might be a viable option though -- not sure if I want a check-out command in my .bashrc/.xsession though -- too much can go wrong... eg if git/mercurial for some reason isn't available won't run without errors...).
OTOH, Long Term Support. You shouldn't have to upgrade for awhile if its a pain for you.
11.10 was when I switched over to Mint and never looked back, and it seems that doing so was a wise move, given the Amazon adware/spamware/spyware that Canonical saw fit to include in more recent versions.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182
Even though Mint includes proprietary binaries (like Flash and Audio/Video codecs), which may or may not contain opaque questionable material, at least the third party non-open-source software is something that (arguably) improves the distribution and actually serves a purpose for me, as the end user.
Mint has changed over time too, though, and now I'm thinking about moving to a personally customized Debian image, and a hobbyist project. Hopefully it won't prove to be too demanding to pull off.
What I did was decide to sit down and do an Arch install. Yes it takes time, and yes you have to know what you're doing. But I invested the time up front, and now it runs very reliably, and faster on the same machine.
I say if you want to GSD the best thing to do is set up something like Debian, Arch or Gentoo and invest the time setting it up so you can use it without problems later. I don't know about you but I have better things to do than screw with an OS all time, I have real work to do. These "harder" distros are great for that.
To me, distribution projects like Debian, Arch & Gentoo serve as a useful source for complete repositories of working, interoperable packages, moreso than they serve as a convenient provider of a working operating system.
I tend to chalk up buggy, quirky work-arounds and long waits for bug fixes in Linux as the price I'm willing to pay to be able to see the source, and receive the software for free. Annoying glitches are something I wouldn't tolerate from Apple or Microsoft, if I'm going to shell out for the high price tags placed on their operating systems.
How hard is it to get a custom system up and running from Arch? I haven't done anything like that in a few years although I've had a lot of experience with setting up custom FreeBSD systems. Is it more or less like that?
What I'm reaching for is something that "just works" and that I can work on reliably instead of having to fix obscure problems all the time. I figure once I set something up that works, I can simply create an image of it to use later.
It helps to have a good knowledge of Linux to do it, because you know where things should go and where to look if there is a problem, but it doesnt' require you to become a kernel hacker just to get it to a prompt.
To be fair, Unity in 11.10 was quite broken and slow and resource hungry, but they fixed that in 12.04 and 12.10. I understand if people don't like Unity, but it's been getting faster and better than in the earlier versions. Personally I use cinnamon.
I will be upgrading fairly early; probably at the end of April. I have a big deadline in late April and upgrading Ubuntu will be my reward/punishment. I suppose I will listen for any disgruntled users before I make the plunge, however, and reassess if things look too problematic.
Note: this is for a work machine, but a PC, not a server or something like that.
They decided to delay the spring release in 2006 to june, so it ended up as 6.06 instead of 6.04.
Moving to new LTS right away is often a suicide mission.
Personally, I'd wait at least 3 months, and follow bug reports before switching.
Nvidia, where are my native Linux Optimus drivers?
I am going to upgrade to 14.04 in a couple of months and see what happens.
I think the increase in desktop graphics performance has to do with the updates in Mesa 3D Graphics Library. Ubuntu 13.10 has 9.1, while 14.04 has 10.1.
Though I would have thought that Intel HD 4000 would provide decent performance even with the old Mesa. I'm on GMA 4500MHD (GM45, ThinkPad X200, circa 2008) and that feels laggy sometimes (with all special effect options I could find tuned to a minimum), especially when I compare it to my brother's desktop with gaming-grade video card. Most times I put up with it, but one time I decided to try the mesa 10.2-devel, and suddenly - what a relief, my old laptop finally feels like it has no problems displaying windows, again! There are some glitches when displaying some window decorations, but I'm ok with that, as long as the smoothness of work is back (I guess, that's the artifact of -devel version).
It's probably just that Lubuntu is my only reference point - it's so lightweight plain Ubuntu feels laggy in comparison. Doesn't make me any less happy with the increase in responsiveness though :)
You mean, not like this? http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm249/hrenistic/ubuntu_13...
I find it is just quality of life. If I use 4gigs, I can only have 2 real memory intensive applications open at the same time. If I had 8+, I could easily have anything I want open in normal usage and not break a sweat.
It honestly feels like there is some kind of problem with the system swapping (or failing to swap some memory) or some memory leak that I can't quite track down. Maybe something got fixed somewhere in the last two years...
It sounds like you might be using a 32 bit version, which will not utilize more than 4GB of RAM. 64 bit versions have the ability to address memory beyond the 4GB limit of 32 bit systems.
With 32 bit versions of Linux the kernel is mapped into the upper 1GB of address space, and then whatever is left over from the remaining 4GB is exposed for general purpose use, and made visible to the user. The means that by default, even if you have 4GB of RAM, you'll never actually see anything more than 3GB exposed for your use, because the kernel has already reserved 1GB of RAM for itself. (these ratios change proportionately, when less than 4GB of RAM is present)
It's also possible that your system is hitting the 3GB mark and then paging virtual memory to your swap partition.
Edit: 10GB RAM and SSD!
That's where they are. The drivers crash on suspend/resume, so you need the ctrl-alt-backspace combo to kill X but otherwise it's OK. Newer versions are better, but they're not included in the official repo yet.
Use Linux they said, your computer will stop crashing they said...
I'm not touching any Nvidia driver until shit starts working. But thanks for update! Appreciated a lot.
You are actually saying that Intel 4000 is working well in Fedora 20 :D
I'm having a lot of good results from AMD and Intel on Mesa. The modern AMD GPU lineup is finally almost up to snuff and performing really well, Intels stuff has always been rock solid, so I could never recommend Nvidia to anyone using Linux again, unless you need OGL 4+ functionality.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. I love using it for my professional work. However stability is not the reason.
And that's why, when a mate asks me which laptop to buy to use with linux, I ever suggest not to buy one with a nvidia gpu because even with bumblebee the user experience is shit.
I'm going to use Ubuntu on Microsoft Surface Pro 2, because even though full convergence for Ubuntu is delayed, I think of all Linux distros it is in the best position to run on such devices. Some enthusiasts have made 13.10 work on Surface Pro 2, surely it can only get better from there? http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2183946
The shell scales perfectly, GTK3 apps scale as well. Firefox has the `layout.css.devPixelsPerPx` setting in about:config that you can change to 2 or 4 to make it scale properly.
Chrome doesn't yet support HiDPI screen but setting the default zoom level to 200% does the trick.
Thats awesome news!
Is there any advantage to using Debian over Ubuntu for servers and/or development?
But why does it still have a "Floppy Disk" icon in the launcher? This is 2014 right? I feel like that is even more absurd than using a floppy disk icon for save buttons in documents. My desktops and laptops don't even have optical drives anymore, much less floppies.
Because the BIOS of the VM reports a Floppy Disk even if you add no Floppy Disk to the list of hardware installed.
That's a bug for the VM BIOS, and a feature for Ubuntu.
You can disable it if you want: http://imgur.com/anGmzpj
Broken completely in 13.04 and 13.10 and somewhat broken in 14.04 (Alt-F opens File menu but any attempt at a second note in the chord opens a different top level menu).
Otherwise sensible changes, menus on window bars makes sense on larger monitors and shrinking sidebar very nice on a 1280 by 800 screen. Very snappy from live image on a Core Duo 2 laptop with Intel graphics (Thinkpad X200s). Good for demonstration of Linux!
I can't live without the Super+[1,2,3,4...] shortcuts.
One of the most noticably broken parts of Gnome Shell for me is that my Pidgin notifications/alerts seem to be broken. They neither flash the item in the taskbar, nor give me a popup to let me know that a new message has arrived. I had an extension to fix this, but that has since broken upon Gnome version change. There is a messenger integration into the user account menu in the top right, but there is no way of changing the client from the default to Pidgin.
I only use Gnome on my travel laptop, so I get little snapshot peeks at how it's going. I've had these problems I've mentioned for quite a while now (and many more besides), it only seems to be getting worse. The Gnome devs seem to be completely ignoring the community and charging off down their own path of weird unusability.
For my main desktop I just run AwesomeWM, which is almost completely pain-free and gets the hell out of my way.
Never made sense to me.
Much less cluttered than unity (most of the time you just have a single black bar at the top of the screen) and handles workspaces nicely.
I never liked gnome 2, though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
The difference between Gnome and Unity is that if there's something you don't like about the former, you can install an extension to fix it. If there isn't an extension, you can write one - at least theoretically.
Anecdotally, that sort of shifts the blame for missing functionality around. It's no longer "my wm is missing x" it's "I haven't written x for my wm yet."
No signs of anyone fixing them either, it's been 6 months since my Pidgin extension broke :(
My main point of contention is that Unity's dash isn't fast enough for me and I am tired to dig the registry to get rid of the on-line suggestions. But overall I think Unity has a better App/Window management than GNOME (the dock is much more functional for instance). So no 14.04 for me. Except if performances are okay and if the team pulling Ubuntu GNOME show good support.
The trick is to use extensions. In particular, the "shellshape" extension for GNOME Shell is a pretty good approximation to sane tiling window managers.
This also means that Canonical gets to keep supporting their darling (Upstart) for another five years ;)
Edit: to clarify, I mean upgrading from this release to the final.
Normal upgrades also require apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade the kernel as there's a new package.
The real answer is that things like Vim and Emacs long ago came up with interfaces that don't require toolbars/menubars. They were added a long time ago, but I am amongst the people that turn them off and don't use them even though they are available. For many of us, mousing is less efficient than well tuned muscle memory.
I'll consider trying out Ubuntu again when 14.04 LTS comes out this month. Maybe I'll get used to it, who knows.
To me the nice thing about GNU/Linux on the desktop is that each person can have the interface they want. This has secondary benefits where if you have your interface which is significantly different from my preferred interface, it forces application developers that really care about supporting their users to develop high quality abstraction layers that support both. The same goes for software packaging, driver support, general compatibility of proprietary software, etc. So, by all means, keep using Mint, it is in my best interest if you do (and yours, and everybody elses).
Anyone else running Minecraft on Intel HD Graphics 3000? In 14.04 or otherwise.
If you want /usr/bin/python to be replaced, this is unlikely to ever happen[0], but what difference does that make?
There's a ppa for arm-gcc that I want to use (https://launchpad.net/gcc-arm-embedded) , but so far it's still on Ubuntu 13.04. How is it possible to try to make the ppa work on Ubuntu 14.04? What are the steps involved? Is there some way to find out how the ppa was made for Ubuntu 13.04 and recreate those steps on 14.04?
A few notes: - the "stability" I refer to is always minor errors - I remove lots of packages every time I install it, although I've experienced system error notifications even when I didn't uninstall anything
All in all, I'd say that there is a lack of polishing, at the low-level, more than lack of stability.
There is no excuse for having the installation fail, though, and it happened a number of times.
To reply the question directly, I've used betas a few times, and they worked as much as the final version for me. I wouldn't do it now though - in the past, for my usage, some types of changes were very significant; today, I get very little in upgrading.
I wish I never upgraded to 13.10. Sometimes drag-maximizing my window can crash my entire system. And compiz leaks memory like a sieve, sometimes I will wake up to find compiz using ~5.5gb of memory and the system will be unusable. Gotta restart!
When I first upgraded, I thought "oh, it's always like this at the start, they'll fix it." And here we are at the next version and it still hasn't been fixed.
Probably jumping ship (to another Linux distro) once my next work deadline passes.
Regardless, I do not have enough loyalty to Ubuntu to do this kind of work. There are a number of open source projects that I am involved with, and if I spend time on this (likely to be fruitless) endeavor, I end up with less time to spend on projects I care about.
My post is purely to vent, and to serve as a warning for those looking to try Ubuntu Desktop. My personal opinion is to try something else. I am.
Problems of that sort were understandable in 1995, when Linux and the few distributions available at the time were still relatively immature. They were even understandable in the very early 2000s, when hardware support sometimes wasn't great. But these days, there's really no excuse for a lack of quality like you're describing.
I agree, Ubuntu seems to work nicely out of the box, but behaves more and more like Windows, a kind of gradual deterioration over time. I am always getting warnings about some problem from suspend. It doesn't (seem to) stop anything working so far, but the install is only a month or two old.
On the other hand I tried Manjaro - a user friendly version of Arch. That needed a few more tweaks to get everything working after the initial install, but I have had it on another laptop for far longer, and so far non of these niggley problems like in Ubuntu.
pulseaudio -k
I mean, seriously, Unity is a piece of garbage. You have to look up some magical key combination to do something as simple as launching multiple instances of an application. It's as bad as the Mac [1] -- designed to cater to users who aren't smart enough to understand the concept of "multiple instances of an application."
In order to launch something, you have to search for it -- WTF? I don't want to search for my application, I know what application I want to run! Let me run it dammit!
That whole "no menu you can browse and discover what's installed on your system" is a huge barrier, especially to new users to the Linux ecosystem, because how are you supposed to know the default email client is called Evolution, or your spreadsheet is "LibreOffice Calc"? If there's a comprehensive, categorized menu of all installed applications, you can look through it to, you know, browse what's on your system.
Unity is supposed to be good for noobs. I probably have way more understanding of computer fundamentals than anyone who fits in the "noob" category so I probably have a better chance of figuring out what the UI's trying to do, I probably have way more tolerance for crappy, clunky UI's than most noobs [2], and every time I've tried Unity I've usually uninstalled it within a day. If Unity sucks too much for me to handle, the only noobs I can see sticking with it are those who've never used a computer before and have no idea that it's possible to do better.
[1] Sorry if this isn't up to date. I don't use Macs much; the last time I used a Mac was sometime around 2004.
[2] I played a lot of DOS games in the 1990's. Enough said.
I love it! (but it's released several months after Ubuntu is released)
Now I need about 6 ppas to add support for Trusty before I can upgrade my main system to it.
Including TrueCrypt.
1) drop the ridiculous Unity desktop. maybe I am old and out of touch, but that was <i>horrific</i>.
2) Dual boot just works with UEFI/Windows 8.1
3) Supports audio and graphics hardware in common brands like Acer
I have 9 installed on a samsung since 2009 and it's been an absolute pleasure, just worked. Trying to get 12 or 13 onto a modern Acer however... was a nightmare. V disappointing. I still don't have a functioning soundcard and the battery indicator only starts 1 in 10 boots.
>>> 1) drop the ridiculous Unity desktop. maybe I am old and out of touch, but that was <i>horrific</i>.
1) They continue to not listen to you. :)
While I actually like Unity and after during 13.x series Unity stopped working for me I ended up on KDE.
Thus far I have been able to costomize it to a level where it beats any other desktop environment I have used so far.
Only beef I have with it is inability to set windows key as launcher shortcut. But alt+r works reasonably well.
It's very clear that Unity isn't for everyone, but I don't understand why people who know it's not for them seem to still want to use Ubuntu.
It's like a racing driver saying that a Ford Focus doesn't handle corners the way they like it. Guess what they are probably right - but car is designed for the majority of users and wouldn't as usable for them if you set it up to suit the 1% that are racing car drivers.
As an aside, you do realise that Ubuntu has the best "hardware support" because we ship on the most OEM's. It's the shipping millions of units a year that ensures that the supply chain cares about Desktop Linux - Intel, Nvidia, Broadcom etc aren't charities. And, we ship on the most OEM's because we have the largest set of 'general users' - and Unity works for them.
ps I work for Canonical but this is my personal opinion.
If you do that, why not start from one of Xubuntu or Lubuntu instead?
(FWIW I use Ubuntu GNOME as my default desktop distribution)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
Really though, it's iOS and Android that closed bug #1.
2) I haven't had that much experience with Windows 8, but for many systems the UEFI implementation by the vendor is so bad that it will only boot singular binaries in the Windows EFI locations. That means you can never have multiple OSes on that EFI, and there ain't jack any Linux distro can do to change that. Additionally, Windows will wipe all other EFI applications when you install it and it regenerates an EFI partition, as it always has in every version ever, it will never play nice with any other OS.
3) This relates to 2, but if hardware vendors won't produce Linux drivers nobody can force them.
But the important lesson is to not buy a Windows computer and bitch when it isn't a good Linux computer. They are not equivalent, the same hardware is not supported on both OSes (try putting Windows on a RaspPi) and unless you want to have to deal with faulty firmwares and have to stringently analyze every part you buy to make sure its supported hardware (principally because hardware distributors are garbage at mentioning Linux compatibility anywhere) then you should just buy a Linux computer from thinkpenguin, system76, or any of the other actual Linux hardware vendors that will provide you a system that given whatever version of Ubuntu's kernel it is running, and beyond, you know the hardware will work out of the box on any distro. That is how to use Linux.
Not true. The market can vote with their wallets. If you're buying a computer, try to look for models that have good Linux support.
1) No more Unity trolls in Ubuntu posts. No one is making you use Unity. There are hundreds of other distributions for you to use, and only one happens to use Unity.
Pick any other Linux distribution and stop trolling.