Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released
ubuntu.com
ubuntu.com
I'm not a big linux vs. windows or ARM vs. intel fanatic, but I'm excited at what seems to be a disruptive inflection point coming up in the next year or so...
I have an Eee 1000 which had a 40gb SSD - there are two reasons that you can't get that today.
- SSD prices have gone up.
- You can't put the cheap version of Windows on a device with a large SSD, so in the interest of rationalising product lines you can only get small SSDs or hard disks.
If Windows can't be put on the device then at least the second pressure won't exist.
Why not?
(BTW I don't know how to quote properly on HN, little help!)
1. italics - to this with asterisks ( * ). To operate, they must be adjacent to the text that is being quoted, and end up looking like this. If not adjacent, you get * this *
2. Use ">" and indentation, like in email.
3. use quotes - like you did.
nb: there is help page available for the above syntax: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc It used to be available as a link next to the textarea when you comment, but I just checked and it appears to be gone.
You might want to check out the FAQ in general if you're new (read: I strongly suggest you check out the FAQ): http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (there's a link to it at the bottom of the frontpage; I'm being extra helpful by repeating it here)
http://www.itexaminer.com/microsoft-adds-to-atoms-restrictio...
Supposedly the Win 7 license has no such restriction.
Strictly incorrect, as Windows CE does run on ARM CPUs, and I'd wager that most first-gen ARM netbooks ship with Windows CE instead of Linux.
http://junk.arandomurl.com/type.jpg
all default installs, ill reply in 10 minutes or something confirming which is which
2) Windows (XP I think...)
3) Ubuntu
I may have transposed OS X and Ubuntu though...
2) Windows. Everything is slammed into pixel boundaries, making it look clean. Verdana is optimized for this style of rendering, so it doesn't look terrible.. but it's definitely not accurate.
3) Ubuntu. Worst of both worlds. Fuzzy and inaccurate.
ubuntu obviously chooses sharpness over balance (H and E), however osx has virtually every lowercase character heavily aliased, its blurry to the point where its almost 2 shades lighter than its supposed to be and there are individual characters A, u, B, a where it is almost a joke
Ubuntu has similar (but not exactly the same) levels of fuzziness, but the rendering is inaccurate. Character tracking/spacing is the biggest issue, but there are others.
If you look at traditional fonts that are designed for print or general purpose use (e.g. Helvetica, Frutiger, Univers, Myriad, etc.), the accuracy and quality of OS X rendering stands out considerably. There is simply no comparison.. and once you get used to it, the small amount of "fuzziness" that you observe in small point sizes just doesn't bother you anymore.
I use osx every day, I am very used to it, I just prefer ubuntus rendering by quite a long way
I use Ubuntu configured to use Windows style hinting without sub-pixel smoothing, and I have absolutely every font forced to Verdana. I'm glad that there is accidentally a little bit of logic behind my choice.
http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/font-cleartype.png
And yes, I wish Ubuntu would at least make DejaVu the defaults for everything out of the box.
sudo aptitude install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Still.. even if you do install the right fonts, the results will be the same.
Ubuntu and OS X are not even remotely comparable from a typography standpoint. Using Freetype (the Linux/X11 lib for font rendering), tracking and stem thickness is inconsistent, ascenders and descenders get cut off, etc.
The Freetype team puts forth a valiant effort, but until they're allowed to use Adobe/Apple/etc.'s patented hinting algorithms, there's no comparison.
1) There aren't many free typefaces for daily use that are beautiful, so you have to buy (or commission) several and "open source" them.
2) Techniques for AA font rendering that maximize aesthetics and readability are protected by numerous software patents. Years ago there was a short-lived patch in Xorg that had a modern font-AA algorithm that held its own against the competition, but it turned out to step on several patents so it was axed out of fear of litigation. That fear is very real, as typography-related tech patents are one of the most aggressively guarded elements of tech-IP.
As a result, the Linux developers have been forced to re-invent the wheel from the ground up when it comes to typography in Linux distributions.
In include/freetype/config/ftoption.h:
enable FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING
enable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER
disable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_UNPATENTED_HINTING
Gentoo is the only distro I know of that has it turned on by default.
Ubuntu's avowed mission is to bring Linux to the Masses. For the masses, a computer still "looks" like Windows. Ubuntu being a Funded initiative unlike Arch(my choice), Gentoo, Crunchbang et all needs to fund the development of typography on Linux.
Yes, its possible to download msttcorefonts (with some creativity you could also get the Consolas set of fonts) and get Cleartype or Os X type smoothing - but as long as its not the default , i am afraid there is no pushing Linux onto the masses.
But I'm not sure what is the problem with font customisation you're referring to. There's a dialog with 4 basic choices (from "blurry" to "crisp, subpixel) and another dialog for fine tuning where you see examples for every single option. How can it be simpler?
Basically, my take is that you need the fancy expensive typefaces and the patented hinting if you want type to look really good at small sizes and without anti-aliasing i.e. Windows before cleartype or Macs before OS X.
The vast majority of people don't want that, they want OS X style rendering, particularly if their monitor is 95dpi or up. Admittedly there are a vocal minority of geeks that grew up with the former type of font rendering, but even they seem to limit this preference to coding fonts and even they seem to be leaving this behind as dpis go up.
If you want OS X rendering on Linux you can have it today, without patented code, or the need for meticusously hinted fonts (which makes them much easier to produce as open source).
It basically involves going into the advanced Gnome font controls turning off all hinting. Voila! "Blurry" Mac OS X style font rendering. You can add sub-pixel rendering to taste.
You can also make it look like XP, which I personally think is a bit retrograde and ironically this does require well-hinted fonts (like Microsoft's) and patented code.
There's a how-to here: http://www.sharpfonts.com/
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html
I'd not heard about these subpixel patents, but I'd be happy to have them removed from Linux as I honestly don't think they add that much in Mac OS X style font presentation, as opposed to Windows Cleartype style.
But now I'm pretty sure that no operating system can beat my Ubuntu system in font rendering. maybe after this little hack. http://rewind.themasterplan.in/2007/07/15/sexy-smooth-fonts-...
My main concern with this release is the ongoing, phantom ext4 (and sometimes 3?) corruption problem. Depending on which reports you read, it affects 64-bit installations specifically, which is what I use.
As much as the software, I want to ensure that there's plenty of community documentation and collective experience compiled before I switch. My System76 laptop here is my bread and butter; I don't want to find myself pathfinding on a new problem when I need to get things done, I want someone to have already charted a solution.
Also its your RAM + Videocard Memory that is your memory, so while you might have say 4 gig, and it would seem to show up on your computer, its including your video card memory.
* You need to compute extremely large numbers. You'll get big performance boosts here.
* You need more then ~3.5 G ram. In which case you actually have to buy AT LEAST 8G to see a positive impact. Even this is not a hard requirement, as there are work arounds in 32-bit. But 64-bit is an absolute must if an individual process needs that much ram.
note: I see I'm voted down, and maybe I'm a little harsh in my comment, but can anyone add any other reasons to go to 64 bit? I've read a ton over the years and those are the only two I could find. Maybe I should add "because 64 is bigger then 32 and I can tell ppl my OS is 64 bit"
edit: Double is a great exaggeration, but not as much as the replies indicated. I moved from a 64-bit slicehost with 512M to a 32-bit linode with 320M and have LESS memory woes. The libraries really are almost twice as big. I speak from experience and not from theory.
1. It can provide performance boost if you take advantage of that 64-bit calculation (two 32-bit calculations) is done in one clock-cycle, you can actually achieve 100% speed up.
2. Use more than 4G memory is not a big deal in scientific computing, and let's face it, more memory is better than read from disk.
3. The argument about the double memory consumption is plain wrong. All program still use int as the main type, which only 32-bit long. Only pointers takes 64-bit long, but you don't save much pointers in your memory (what's the point of keep 4G pointers in memory anyway?). Thus, the memory consumption is little larger, but definitely manageable.
4. (This point may be wrong, please correct me) double precision is common for calculation, and it takes exact 64-bit long, which makes it more suitable for 64-bit CPU.
ints remain the same size, but longs and pointers are double the size. 64-bit libraries may be bigger, but there's no reason they would double in size. In general, a 64-bit system uses more RAM, but not double.
I'm not sure if 1.25-1.5x would be accurate as a rule of thumb, but 2x is almost certainly too high. (It will depend on the data structures etc. involved.)
- IA32 is register starved ISA, AMD64 is not. It has doubled the amount of general registers.
- AMD64 doesn't have to support the x87 FPU baggage. As a result, it is simpler to deal with fp math.
I was asking because I choose to install the 32bit version ... 64 bit packages are more unstable being less popular.
As the other commenter mentioned, there are the CPU optimizations to consider, but what decided my final transition (I've tried it out a few times over the past few years) was when System76 moved to shipping their systems with the 64-bit distro installed. I want to maximize their ability to support me, so when I did a fresh install on a new drive I opted for 64-bit as well.
Most of the problems of compatibility with 32-bit binaries have been trivialized or are routed around easily enough these days. Though 64-bit Linux was never as much hassle as x64 Windows. ;^)
Of course the 32-bit JVM also has a 2.5 gig or so address space limit that makes no goddamn sense whatsoever, so if you want to process more than 2 gigs of data for any reason you have to either do it offline or you have to buy twice as much memory and do it on a 64 bit VM.
As you can see, x86-64 isn't just about memory size.
It's not a ton by any measure...
The sooner we can ditch x86 (and that includes amd64), the better.
What AMD did was to extend the x86 ISA with a handful extra registers and double the size of all of them. This allowed x86 to survive until these days, slowed down the migration towards 64-bit computing and confined much better architectures to specific niches.
No, I will not thank AMD for that.
Use a mirror! ;)
My download via torrent is cruising right along..
substitute whatever particular image you need, it's all named accordingly.
As opposed to running Ubuntu under VMWare
I am still hoping for a reliable/official VMWare Tools .deb repository.
I am having one of those days. I read 'VMWare Tools' as 'VMWare Server' for some reason. Cheers!
Unless there is some strange functionality you need from VMWare that isn't supported in VirtualBox, I suggest giving it a try.
You do have to re-enable the source manually - it's not deleted, but the 9.04 -> 9.10 upgrade process turns off third party sources as a precaution.
Just finished upgrading an AMD quad core box, smooth sailing.
http://patrickmylund.com/blog/how-to-install-vmware-tools-on...
EDIT: Nevermind, the website just changed.
I've been using the beta for a while now, it is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L. It's competing with OSX now (having surpassed Windows long long ago)
and to be fair to the original poster, the link is available now, the site was in the middle of updating
but the polish has always been lacking
To me Linux is a lot closer now than it was in the past because you can pop a Ubuntu CD into a computer and 9 times out of time it you have a working computer with sound and everything half an hour later. 7 years ago, when I first installed linux, that would have been more like 1 time out of 10.
Me too, and I have a Dell laptop in the mail that I'll be installing Ubuntu on and trying to use as my main machine.
But you know what isn't the same in all of these programs between OS X and Linux? Font rendering. I can get Linux to "OK" but OS X is always refreshing in comparison.
The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?
Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configure X and fonts/local.conf.
But open Firefox and and go to Gmail or something and compare it to OS X.
2. Windows XP
3. Ubuntu
all plain installs
It's noticeably slower and fonts are uglier (even after installing exactly the same TrueType fonts as on Windows).
I have a 19 inch LCD display that's very decent, but I purchased it before Vista's release. The fonts on Vista have a red hallow that are unbearable, and I'm not the only one with this problem (and trust me, I played with the clear-type settings, although they don't make that easy).
On a big monitor with a typical DPI, clear-type just adds visual noise.
In Gnome the standard font anti-aliasing that doesn't use clear-type is great.
That PC is the 'family' computer - so basically all it's used for is Surfing, streaming music through iTunes and instant messaging.
It used to run ubuntu but everyone complained about how ugly it is - and I wasn't going back to XP. At least with Win7 I'm in the clear anti-virus wise, no need for that.. yet.
However, it's been a while since I've used it (I have 10.4 and XP machines for the most part), and I get the feeling that Gnome has benefited from Ubuntu far more than KDE has from Kubuntu, being sort of a bastard stepchild at best.
KDE's Konqueror has features that I still find myself wishing for on my Mac on a daily basis. (E.g., the visual view-by-size thing and built-in sshfs are my top two.)
I've not seen any compelling reason to upgrade my Macs from 10.4, so when they finally hit EOL I may seriously reevaluate Kubuntu as my main desktop, see if it's kept up reasonably well versus the mainline Gnome version.
I am sure Windows runs Office, Visual Studio and Internet Explorer much better than Ubuntu, but that's not always a plus.
Neither is running Xcode.
If you're not a geek, it'll fit (any consumer computer going over the counter for the past 6-7 years, probably more, has at least a 20 GB drive in it. Most likely you'll have 100+ GB).
Or something new, like an SSD on which you're attempting to dual/triple boot.
You fail at UI. Any and all information always adds some cognitive load and confuses the user. Every time you think you should show the user something, you must figure out a very convincing reason why you should not just leave it out. There clearly isn't one for majority of users who are going to install ubuntu, and for the rest, googling for two easy words isn't going to be too much of trouble.
Not only are you wrong, but "You fail at UI" is a particularly abrasive way to be wrong.
I might well be wrong about whether it's worth it to show disk space or not. I have no problem admitting this, because I haven't done any studies about it.
> but "You fail at UI" is a particularly abrasive way to be wrong.
>The additional cognitive load of reading a disk space requirement is negligible
Apparently I was too abrasive, or not abrasive enough.
NO amount of cognitive load is negligible. Ever. When you design a dialog with two buttons that both have to be there, both of those buttons are creating a significant amount of cognitive load. Understanding this is largely why apple makes good UI's. You should never try to justify removing something from the UI -- you must instead always have very good reasons why NOT to remove something, and remove it by default if you can't find enough (not any).
As I said, I have not made any studies of how users install ubuntu or what they expect, but as it's supposed to be installed as the os on the computer, in place of whatever that was before, and as there is no commonly available commodity hardware that it won't install on, I can easily see how there is no longer enough justification to show disk space requirements.
Just the first one.
Apple puts the disk space requirements in every single installer. Disk usage is an important piece of information. I'd agree with you if it were something like "Ubuntu requires a Pentium II or higher".
BTW, since it crashed on install instead of catching that my partitions weren't large enough, that's a fail. But by merely providing the info on the DL page, they might have saved themselves some credibility loss as a "user friendly" distro.
But I do appreciate that you didn't throw a lmgtfy.com link in, which would have been really embarrassing for me.
System requirements
Ubuntu is available for PC, 64-Bit and Mac architectures. The Alternate installation CDs require at least 256 MB of RAM (the standard installation CD requires 384MB of RAM). Install requires at least 3 GB of disk space.
But good of you to find it; I would never have thought to look at the Features page. Again, whiny of me.
And even Canonical forgets it's there; now that you pointed it out, some searching reveals a similar page, http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/desktopedition, which says it requires 4 GB of space.
But I'm v happy to hear this: i've struggled with my ATI graphics card the last 2 major versions of ubuntu (7.x i managed to get working after days of hacking around. Never got compiz working though. 8.x I got compiz running, but the general performance was so sluggish it was unusually).
I'll give it another shot.
sean
When was the last time that installing a new Windows involved registry hacks. I'll admit that I haven't used Windows 7 or Vista, but I don't remember hacking the registry on Win95/98/ME/2k/XP installs.
Maybe you shouldn't get so bent out of shape so quickly. It's not like he was bashing Linux and promoting Windows/OSX. If someone gripes about Windows do you immediately rush in to make comparisons to similar problems in OSX or Linux?
With the way that Ubuntu does releases though, it's little wonder that people are scared to update. It's been a revision or two since Ubuntu pushed Xorg over to using evdev for mouse handling/etc, and my Thinkpad's TrackPoint is still only recognized as a regular mouse (no scrolling) when previous Ubuntu revisions had readily setup scrolling automatically for me.
{edit} I'll add there are multiple blog posts, and a LaunchPad report, IIRC with the fix... which the Ubuntu devs have not seen fit to include in Ubuntu, so a fresh install mean applying all of the fixes. {/edit}
With the update to Jaunty (9.04), I've had a few woes with my Atheros chipset:
1. ath5k was forced as the default out-of-the-box driver for Atheros chipsets over the previous madwifi (ath_hal) driver.
2. ath5k is flakey whenever I come home and connect to my wifi network... even when the laptop is 2 feet away from the access point. It will connect/disconnect from the network 2-5 times before deciding to stay connected.
3. If I change position in my room (with the access point in the middle), the same connect/disconnect 'settling' period still needs to happen.
4. /var/log/syslog is filled with spam from NetworkManager with messages along the lines of this (even when I see no visible disconnects in nm-applet):
'disconnect from network (mynetwork)'
'connect to network (null)'
'disconnect from network (null)'
'connect to network (mynetwork)'
6. The madwifi driver still doesn't play nice with suspend-to-ram (and maybe suspend-to-disk but I haven't tested it). It will refuse to work after waking back up (and a modprobe -r/modprobe doesn't help). Ubuntu could easily fix this... Just need to drop `SUSPEND_MODULES="$SUSPEND_MODULES ath_hal"` into a file in '/etc/pm/config.d'. This problem has existed for at least 2 or 3 revisions of Ubuntu (maybe more). The fix is on the web and on Launchpad.net, but I have yet to see the fix make its way into an official release.
If me, as someone that knows my way around Linux, can get frustrated with these issues, then how can 'Bringing Linux to the Masses' be anyway near achievement? My laptop isn't exactly a brand new laptop with highly unsupported hardware. I'm running a ThinkPad X41.
[ Oh, and did I mention that the headphone jack stops working after the second time I suspend/resume after a fresh boot? I'm perfectly willing to work with the Ubuntu devs on Launchpad, but all of my suggestions/information is apparently falling on deaf ears. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/101986 ]
I can't remember the last time I edited the registry or had to install a driver manually.
Don't get me wrong, I run Ubuntu and I like it. The upgrade process on the whole is much better than a even a few years ago. I just loathe upgrading since it can take weeks to iron out problems with the upgrade. Invariably there are issues with suspend/resume, video drivers, randr, gnome preferences borked, etc. Perhaps these problems will go away in the not too distant future now that more and more manufacturers are shipping Ubuntu pre-installed.
The point isn't whether you or the other respondent has recently edited the registry or hunted down a driver. The point was that all operating systems have their troubles.
The standard gripe about Linux distros is hardware related. Well, um, duh: if the hardware is closed source, there are going to be problems getting things to work just right. Hardware manufacturers cater to Windows (for obvious reasons) and Apple controls what hardware their os runs on. Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian et al. are not in a position to do this. So, yeah, there are probably always going to be those kinds of troubles with Linux.
That said, you can't beat the price, the ability to get at the source code (if that matters to you) or the package manager (for Debian-based distros, at least).
No, the point is I haven't had those troubles on Vista. I haven't had these issues for a long time. I could care less about open or closed source drivers. I just like it when things work. And I like it so much I'm even willing to pay money for it. That is the point.
In all seriousness, "guides" for setting up Ubuntu are most likely unnecessary or superfluous; they'll just go into some random area of "customization" that 95% of users probably don't need or care about.
If you already have an older version of Ubuntu, just run the command I mentioned, or go to System->Update Manager to handle the upgrade, and get on with your day. If you don't have Ubuntu, just boot the live disc and install it, and go from there.
Guides that target a particular system are still useful (i.e. "How to install Ubuntu 9.10 on a Thinkpad x200") because they are guiding you through the stuff that doesn't work out of the box, even if they are minor issues. (Or hidden options to make something that 'works ok' or 'sorta works' into something that works well)