back to article Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx: A (free) Mactastic experience

Ubuntu 10.04, officially available as of Thursday, is an important update for this popular Linux distro. It's a Long-Term Support (LTS) release - the first since 8.04 two years ago - and it wraps social network with media capabilities and a brace of online services in a brand new look. As an LTS edition, Lucid Lynx will be …

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  1. henrydddd
    Thumb Up

    Just got thru installing 10.04

    I just got through installing 10.4 on 2 network computers. Ubuntu 10.04 is one giant step toward making linux a viable operating system for computers. Congrats to Ubunto and Shuttleworth.

  2. dshan
    Thumb Up

    Upgrade Works!

    10.04 is the first version of Ubuntu I've installed that could successfully upgrade my Dell laptops from the immediately prior version and remain useable when finished. Hooray! It even found my Inspiron 1545's Broadcom WiFi and successfully upgraded the driver for the first time ever. Nothing crashes so far, all apps seem operational and all data is intact.

    It took them long enough, but now Ubuntu is almost as easy to upgrade as my Macs. Better ten years late than never I suppose.

    Of course the key problem with Ubuntu remains, despite window controls on the left and much nicer default colour schemes and icons, etc., it isn't significantly *better* than the competition in any respect, it's just not much worse anymore. It used to be very Windows-like, now it's more Mac-like, but it isn't better than a Mac so why should anyone using a Mac (or Windows) switch?

    It needs a quantum advance over the other systems, some totally new and revolutionary features that make using Ubuntu more fun and more pleasant, easier and more reliable, than other computers. That's the only way to get people to switch systems. It needs something revolutionary like multi-touch, iPhone OS and the Apple app store. But simply aping that would be too late now, they'd only be chasing Apple again instead of leading. That's open source's Achille's heel - design by committee doesn't produce innovation, only emulation of what's already been tried. Like MS they're too scared to knock over the table and switch to Boggle in the middle of a Monopoly game.

    1. Pawel 1

      Well,

      it starts by catching up - music store with major labels in is a good start (yes, it uses MP3 and not Vorbis, but they need to start somehow).

  3. Shingo Tamai
    FAIL

    Gnome/KDE have the appeal...

    ...of a transvestite.

    You can take a look at the inconsistency of the GUI since the first boot clicking on the envelope and on the IM icons on the upper right and... surprise, same options!!!

  4. Al Taylor
    Thumb Up

    Kubuntu etc

    Fred - I tried Kubuntu for the first time on Friday and was disappointed. The whole thing smacked of being unfinished even though I do like the look of the KDE front end. After a few hours I ditched it and installed Ubuntu which is a my default Linux distro (so maybe my problems where as much to do with unfamiliarity as anything else).

    I was a bit disappointed that 10,04 doesn't support the various Realtek wi--fi cards out of the box that Samsung have installed in Lord knows how many tens of thousands of netbooks (like my N140), but a quick google and I found a walk-through to install the relevant drivers. Once I had that sorted I was away. I like the look of 10.04 but don't really see the point of the various built-in social network systems - not sure that is what Linux should be about.

    My N140 now dual-boots perfectly from the GRUB menu that Ubuntu installs so I have a choice between slow-but-steady Windows 7 and fleet of foot Ubuntu. One thing I have noticed with 10.04 is that it seems able to work with a greater variety of 3G USB dongles. It's a faster boot than 9.10 too, if only by a few seconds.

  5. ray hartman

    superb Luxy Lynx 10.04

    A superb usrland outing for LL_10.04 for which most can be thankful. Runs flawlessly and intuitively on beefy modern desktop kit. I've happily run x64_LL since beta_1.

    Debiolian & Slackmolian byteboyz can gag-on-da-spoon.

  6. Hans 1

    Change

    I think change sucks, and when software companies change the environment, like when ubuntu 9.10 went dash instead of bash which broke most shell scripts out there just to gain a couple secs boot up speed (who reboots ubuntu?), ffs!

    So installed it over the weekend for the missis and yes, it is polished, by no means comparable to Mac OS X, moving the window buttons (who cares), that is where they are supposed to be, if you ask me, but I could not be bothered where they are, tbh.

    Installed right-away, supported all hardware, not like windows XP ... this is a dell (given to me), the original install disks were gone, luckily I have a dvd containing a restore partition and a legal copy of ghostpe (the real ghost 2002, not the crap Norton try to sell you now).

  7. Allan 1
    Happy

    A title is required....

    do-release-upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 went flawlessly on my laptop. Even picked up my onboard wifi, which 9.10 never did, meaning I can throw out the crappy pcmcia wifi adapter. Was quite impressed.

    do-release-upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 on my desktop, for some obscure reason the keyboard stopped functioning during the upgrade, meaning I couldn't respond to a prompt, forcing a hard reboot, and an unbootable system. Not impressed at all now. Had to install clean from a CD.

    Spoke to a few friends, they all suffered the same issue of the keyboard stopping working during a do-release-upgrade. The common denominator is that they were all USB keyboards. I'm guessing the upgrade unloads some usb drivers. So, I recommend connecting a PS/2 keyboard before doing an upgrade. YMMV,

    Overall, I like the new look, seems to respond faster, boot faster, and more hardware supported.

  8. Lord Elpuss Silver badge
    Flame

    What's with Linux app names anyway?

    Gotta clear the air on this but there's something I really don't get. What IS it with the stupid, nerdy, geeky, childish names given to most Linux apps? Gwibber? I'm sorry but no matter how good the app is, whoever chose the name Gwibber is fucking retarded. And that's being polite. Same goes for the majority of Linux apps I see - The Gimp being a prime example. I mean - it might just be me but when I hear that name I get a mental image of a fat naked German trussed up in black leather with a rubber ball in his mouth.

    For me, it's these naming conventions that put me off Linux. The spirit of geeky one-upmanship compels me regularly to try one variant of Linux or another (Debian, SUSE (through my company), Ubuntu have all been and gone, plus a few of those interface-modded variants such as Mint) but when I go to download an app I want to sync my PDA and find out it's called Slackdribble or some such shite makes me want to puke, cry and panic-uninstall all at the same time.

    Linux guys, if you want to conquer the world (and let's face it who doesn't), please, PLEASE get the names sorted out and try and be a little bit professional about it. Just a bit. For me it would make the difference, and who knows, there might be a few million others out there like me.

    Let the flaming begin.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Linux

      re: get rid of the silly names

      We'll get right on that, erm, Lord Elpuss.

    2. Ceiling Cat
      Grenade

      (G)nome (K)DE , naming conventions make sense to me!

      "Same goes for the majority of Linux apps I see - The Gimp being a prime example. I mean - it might just be me but when I hear that name I get a mental image of a fat naked German trussed up in black leather with a rubber ball in his mouth."

      You sick ****!

      Personally, I don't give a **** what they call the video editor/image processing app/chat software as long as it works.

      "when I go to download an app I want to sync my PDA and find out it's called Slackdribble or some such shite makes me want to puke, cry and panic-uninstall all at the same time."

      Why? Why such a severe reaction to the name of a program? Justify your reactions!

    3. tardigrade

      Works both ways.

      "..PLEASE get the names sorted out and try and be a little bit professional about it"

      Yes you're absolutely right. Linux needs to have sensible names like. Bing, Zune, Menlo, Yahoo!, Google, Twitter etc.

      Instead of childish names like, Open Office Word Processor, Open Office Spreadsheet, Disk Usage Analyser, Remote Desktop Viewer, Movie Player, Open Movie Editor, PDF Viewer, E-Book Reader etc.

      Face - Palm.

      Sigh.

  9. The Unexpected Bill
    Flame

    It'll happen...I just don't know when...

    I want to love Linux on the Desktop. I really do. But it's just not there yet.

    With embedded devices and servers, I think Linux is great. I've got a Buffalo wireless router running DD-WRT firmware and a Linksys NSLU2, both of which are pretty good pieces of equipment. Actually, the router and third party firmware are phenomenal. The NSLU2 is tolerable--it does the job it was sold to do, but the firmware is rather buggy and it looks like Linksys is not supporting it any longer. (Yes, I've seen the 'unslung' firmware and others, but I don't think I'm willing to do that. I'm not that dissatisfied or interested in taking a risk.)

    Linux on the desktop, on the other hand...hoo boy. (Do we have time for this?)

    I well remember loading an early release of Red Hat on an IBM PS/1 486. It did work, and gave the machine a new lease on life in a lot of ways. Setting up my dial up connection proved difficult, as did practically every other task. I twiddled with it a while, lost interest and who knows where the machine ended up? I bought a book on Red Hat Linux at the same time, and it was awful. It seems that the book was seriously out of sync with reality, and that didn't help matters. Yes, the version of Red Hat covered by the book matched what I was running on my system.

    A friend of mine installed some release of Debian on an older but nice HP Vectra desktop of some sort. The installation went well and then he tried to take it graphical by setting up X Windows. He never did have much luck getting the onboard Cirrus Logic AGP graphics to operate in anything but VGA mode. I gave him a few video cards with differing chipsets and none did any better. That was where I got involved. Several hours later, we'd determined that although running xf86config produced some result, it wasn't actually writing a *valid* configuration file with the right video driver specified. By that time we had one of his Linux using friends on the phone offering hints, I was madly twinking away at the X configuration file and we finally got it working.

    More recently, I've tried running Linux on a "Sawtooth" Power Macintosh G4/450...a nice machine with an attractive case that really seemed to have been left behind by Mac OS X. Fedore Core 6, on the other hand, really ran beautifully on it. It was all going so well until I tried to set up my DeskJet 5850 printer. CUPS really didn't work at all on this machine, and it took a lot of twidding (consisting mainly of special chants, dark magic and unwise adventures into the inner workings of CUPS) before the printer worked. It only worked for a little while before the print spooler felt that it should send endless copies of a document to the poor little DeskJet. How amusing.

    Well, the machine's got a DVD-ROM drive in it, maybe I can forget about my printing woes by setting up DVD-video decoding? Have you tried this? Har har har. I know this isn't all the fault of Linux, as DVD decoding is mired in a morass of patents, but you would think that it wouldn't be all that hard to add--or if it was, that someone would have said something about where to go and what to do. If anyone did, I never found it and I finally realized that the time I spent on doing this would have been better invested in simply finding and using a physical DVD player.

    I won't talk about my adventures with Mythbuntu, that's a whole other unmitigated disaster area. But at least they're not doing so much worse than every commercial TV/DVR software package on the market. (I've tried a lot of them, and they all suck in some Extra Special way.)

    However, I remain hopeful. I recently built a system and installed Linux Mint (an Ubuntu derivative) on it. It works *great* so far. Adding software and administering the system has (mostly) been a breeze. I've got things working like I want them to. (DVD playback works, although I cheated here as the needed software is included with Mint.) I can get my work done.

    What I'm getting at here is not that Linux doesn't offer GUI handholding the whole way. I don't care about that so much. I generally know what I'm doing, am not afraid to learn and can read computer hardware datasheets and understand them. I don't mind using a command line, configuration wizard or what-have-you. What I get a little tired of are the unmitigated crash landings, the place where the floor just disappears from underneath you. I don't even mind having to study, but one tends to get discouraged after hours and hours of research and experimentation that don't bear any fruit or offer a greater understanding of the system. If you're going to engineer something (whether free or not) you ought to at least Make It Work. (The "Linux Attitude" as it were runs somewhat counter to this, in that the harder it is to do something, and the harder it is to gain an understanding of something, the more it will be appreciated when you do gain that understanding. If you don't wipe out the installation first.)

    I'll leave you with this: When someone like Eric S. Raymond has a misadventure with CUPS ("The Luxury Of Ignorance: An Open Source Horror Story") and someone such as Jamie Zawinski finally buys a Macintosh because of his Linux misadventures, what hope do those of us who are mere mortals have?

    As I said, it's getting there. I'm a big supporter of open source software and I do see the promise in Linux. It will get there. (As you can see from my tirades above, it keeps inching closer.)

    Whew! I'll get my coat.

    1. Chemist

      Re : It'll happen...I just don't know when.

      Don't want to understate your difficulties but I've installed computer after computer with OpenSUSE ......10.3 , 11.0, 11.2 without any difficulties - they just work. Very different systems from 1.2GHz Celerons with 512MB, laptops, AMD64s (single & dual), dual-core Atom fileserver and the latest an Intel dual-core - this one installed in 17 mins. from DVD.

      Several of the systems required the Windows(XP) partition crunching down to make room - no problems - the rest were new (bare) systems or existing Linux installations

      The ONLY problem I've encountered in recent YEARS was one laptop's wifi and I just plugged a PCMIA wifi card in and that sorted that.

      1. The Unexpected Bill

        Clarifications

        That's not quite the point I was trying to make. Linux installations have been generally working very well for some time now, and even with the pitfalls, a lot of things worked just fine.

        What wasn't much fun was waiting for the hole to open up in the ground, never knowing when it would, and wondering what to do to get back out of it again. Make no mistake, other OSes have problems, but with them you can usually figure it out or find someone who has been down that road and seen the light.

        It's been said before, but I'll say it here: what I want to see is the day when I can put my mother (who is not at all computer literate) in front of a Linux machine and *know* that she can use it without falling into some irrecoverable mess. And if she should have a problem, I want to know that I can sort it out with a phone call and a few mouse clicks. That's why she has a Mac right now. (Say what you will, it's proven to be a sound choice for her needs.)

        As a matter of fact, and something I was going to mention in the first post I made: I found IBM's AIX (on an RS/6000 7012-397) to be a LOT less hostile toward the user than Linux. Then again, if a person were to drop $30K on a workstation, they'd darn well expect it to work. (I bought it as scrap for a whole lot less.)

  10. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    10.04 is smooth

    "I pretty much failed to see any difference between Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 12 which I use all the time. OK...this may just be because of the way I use Fedora, but I really saw very little to shout about in 10.04."

    Not surprising. Most of the improvements probably went into gnome in general, rather than ubuntu in particular. Distro makers will come up with improvements, submit a patch against their own distro, these patches will work their way upstream to gnome or kde guys (or whatever app they are patching), will be put into the base install then percolate their way down to all other distros.

    As for the "noone" cares crowd. This is pure bull. I work at a computer surplus, I'd say AT LEAST 1/3rd of the customers HATE the idea of buying Windows, they don't like the rights restrictions (almost everyone has been bitten right in the ass at least ones by the DRM by now), they see anything but what they've used (XP or god forbid 98..) as a huge change anyway, and are just as happy to try Ubuntu as Win7 -- well, happier, since Win7 is expensive. I've had probably 1/3rd of the customers grab a free CD, and quite a few come back and thank me for it.

    Anyway, I updated my Ubuntu boxes to 10.04. I find the moving the buttons to the left superflous but it doesn't bother me. The upgrades (from 9.10) went smoothly. My Inspiron has bcm4318 wireless that always acts up under the free broadcom driver (almost no transmit power); it still does in 10.04. I turned ndiswrapper back on for it. Similarly, my dad's laptop has a chip that wants madwifi, so after upgrade I built madwifi for it again. Both wifis DID work well enough I could use it in a pinch without "fixing" it. I had to upgrade mythtv on my gentoo boxes, since the Ubuntu version of myth was too new to work with them otherwise. Considering the amount of customization I've done on some of those boxes that's not much at all to "break" 8-).

  11. Fred Tourette
    Alert

    Once Again I'll Try...

    ...to install a version of Ubuntu that will like magic make magic with my Atheros wireless crap in my Toshiba laptop, and not make me spend days in the forums and config files getting it to work. Who knows? Maybe this time will be the charm.

    1. serviceWithASmile
      Thumb Up

      atheros...

      i hear ya. have a similar problem with my samsung n140 (my particular one has a wireless card that its not meant to have.... no idea).

      I got around it by installing ndiswrapper, which allowed me to use the xp wireless drivers for that card under ubuntu 9.04. I have upgraded this to 10.04 with no problems in regards to wireless drivers.

      Might be worth a look if you haven't tried that already.

      http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ndiswrapper/index.php?title=Main_Page

      this aside, after this latest release i can see ubuntu really starting to compete with the big boys now. before, they laughed. now they ridicule.

      ubuntu must be doing something right :D

      after upgrading my n140 netbook, it boots in 22 seconds (5 more to login) and runs full 3d compiz desktop effects without so much as a complaint.

      n140 has some function key issues with ubuntu which haven't been resolved yet but everything else is just better. whole system runs faster

      XD

  12. alistair millington
    Thumb Up

    Well worth a look.

    I stuck it on an asus 1000 (The proper one with the 40GB SSD before M$ sullied Asus and it all became HDD to pay homage to the crapware Win7.)

    It ran, it worked. No effort, no hassles and no dramas. Then I started using it and the ONLY drawback is the silly icons on the left hand side, I am told (by a ubuntu forum post) Mark has plans for the right hand side. I managed to at least put them in the right order, min, max, close. As they were also reversed. Madness.

    And flash isn't supported in firefox by default, I have to open extras repository and download a none free version. Boo hiss Mr Shuttleworth.

    1. serviceWithASmile

      you can change the min max and close buttons

      by looking under system > preferences > appearance and selecting another theme other than the default.

      changing to darkroom or human puts the buttons back where they should be.

      it annoyed me too :(

      but well done to them overall, very nice release :)

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not a great first run for me

    I decided to do a clean install instead of upgrade for various reasons. Well, everything went great until the video tried... and tried... and failed to load. Sure, I could hear the famous jungle drums but the video went kaput. Some searching found that MANY video cards crash on loading Grub2.

    The initial setting whacked out my card, which is a brand new ATI 58XX series card. Apparently some Nvidia cards also crashed the video.

    This seemed to be an extended problem as I was goggleing *sic* and found this issue is so common, one can only shudder to think that some idiot would put the wrong line of code... just so it would look better. Sure, we could have used a generic driver and then force people to download the correct driver for a card made since 2009.

    This has to be embarassing to Ubuntu Conical, especially since this is supposedly the LTR for the next three years and it won't boot unless you have certain cards. Maybe they need to "Ubuntu Certify" like Windows does, eh?

    Yes, the fix is easy if you are familiar with interrupting the command line on boot. But can you imagine Grandmama trying this trick at home?

    Shame on you, Cannical...er... Connical..er... Comical!

    1. Ceiling Cat
      FAIL

      Ooer, wot's this shiny thing?

      "Yes, the fix is easy if you are familiar with interrupting the command line on boot. But can you imagine Grandmama trying this trick at home?"

      Somehow, I can't see Granny having the tech savvy to install an OS. The day will come, mind you, when the current generation of tech-savvy folks will be old and feeble. Only when that day comes will your argument be truly valid.

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