View Full Version : Ubuntu 11.04 - Natty Narwhal
Anyone upgraded to this yet? The default desktop has changed, from Gnome to Unity, and I for one, welcome the change so far, though Gnome can still be easily selected from the login screen, and is also still default if you don't have suitable graphics drivers. It did select it for me by default after the upgrade and I think it looks pretty nice, some UI changes too - makes it more like OS/X or Windows 7, which I'm sure not everyone will appreciate, but hey you can't argue against it making sense to run with the big guns here. The bigger screen space is almost overwhelming, and the lenses for searching apps and files make a lot of sense too, as does the easy workspace switcher.
I don't particularly like the Unity launcher so far. The default vertical layout wastes a fair amount of space when it isn't set to auto-hide, and when you do enable that, the movement isn't smooth and the launcher takes rather long to show up. Icons look squeezed in the space allocated for them, and you can't seem to customise them easily either (multiple items with the same icon are hard to use as there aren't any text labels, so you need to hover over them and wait for the text popup, also some items like scripts just don't have an icon so you get a cheesy default tool icon). And some of the stuff that I dragged onto the launcher turned invisible until a reboot.
Messy experience for me, guess I might try out Gnome 3 instead sometime soon.
rpg.314
30-Apr-2011, 18:14
Upgraded to it. I am loving the new interface. :)
I don't particularly like the Unity launcher so far. The default vertical layout wastes a fair amount of space when it isn't set to auto-hide, and when you do enable that, the movement isn't smooth and the launcher takes rather long to show up. Icons look squeezed in the space allocated for them, and you can't seem to customise them easily either (multiple items with the same icon are hard to use as there aren't any text labels, so you need to hover over them and wait for the text popup, also some items like scripts just don't have an icon so you get a cheesy default tool icon). And some of the stuff that I dragged onto the launcher turned invisible until a reboot.
Messy experience for me, guess I might try out Gnome 3 instead sometime soon.
From all I'm reading Gnome 3 is the same but worse. As for the icons, I've been using auto-hide only so far, but I got used to it pretty quickly - it just has a different rhythm for showing up - not instantly, which I actually like because I do the same with XP at the same location, and sometimes when you need to do something with the mouse at the edge then an instant popup gets in the way.
As for the rest, I never hover - I just right click (gives a menu like OS/X) or double-click, which gives you a quick visual preview of all windows belonging to that application.
I just hooked up my iPhone - very nice! If you browse it, you get a full overview of just about everything on it, including the app specific document folders and everything else.
All this is pretty promising - starting to become a pretty good free alternative finally.
Brad Grenz
04-May-2011, 01:47
Last night I was trying to refurbish an old laptop with a clean install of XP for my Mom, but discovered the CD-ROM was toast. I didn't want to go through the hassle of creating a USB installable version of Windows, so I'm gonna see if she can get by with Ubuntu. She only really uses gmail and facebook. Installed it last night and the wifi worked out of the box. Got Chrome and Flash installed and I think she's good to go. We'll see how she adapts!
Blazkowicz
04-May-2011, 04:24
I've just set up gnome 2 in a way I enjoy a lot, I've actually discovered most of the features.
I'm running ubuntu 10.04 from a 20GB hard drive transplanted in my modern PC (the installation was done on an old computer a year ago)
I first started with a funny, good icon theme, gtk and window themes. I did put the top panel bar on the left with autohide, and made it look better, and have nice shortcuts very readily available (firefox, calculator, pulseaudio equalizer, vlc, winamp clone, file manager..) and moved everything around, smaller clock etc. and added "gadgets" I didn't know of and were included from the start, I also trimmed the bottom one (one less desktop, cpu frequency instead of garbage can)
way to keep up with the features.. of a "dying" environment :lol:
really it's the first time ever that I've enjoyed autohide and gadgets, but on plain task bars with orthogonal feature sets. it's as if it were a perfect version of the windows 98/XP taskbar (the flexible part of it, but with way more stuff to put in and no limitation). all with no frills, no animation effect etc.
I'll have a try at an ubuntu 11.04 with gnome 2. for now 11.04 will serve on old computers with LXDE (minimal install followed by apt-getting the desktop), here it's a godsent for old computers merely because of the upgrade to firefox 4 and network browsing in the file manager.
Last night I was trying to refurbish an old laptop with a clean install of XP for my Mom, but discovered the CD-ROM was toast. I didn't want to go through the hassle of creating a USB installable version of Windows, so I'm gonna see if she can get by with Ubuntu. She only really uses gmail and facebook. Installed it last night and the wifi worked out of the box. Got Chrome and Flash installed and I think she's good to go. We'll see how she adapts!
For that use it should be pretty much perfect, I think. I've been amazed at how fast Ubuntu boots up and shuts down, very nice, and as long as you don't need a lot of typical Windows application, there's little to complain about. I don't think that I can use it for my mother still, because she has some really weird wireless dongle to get her internet with specific drivers and passwords and such (she lives outside of range of phone and cable).
For my part, so far I am really happy with Ubuntu 11.04. I'm using the new default GPU accellerated user-interface and although it could still be a little smoother, in general it is very elegant in its simplicity and has most of the stuff I need from it. iPhone integration for instance is excellent - I've been downloading GuitarPro tabs for the solos in RockBand 3, and I could very easily put them in Guitar Pro App's Documents folder. And searching for documents and applications with the 'lenses' (Finder basically) is really nice, as they offer the ten most frequently/recently used items, and then you can click on 'more' to get at anything that didn't show or just type the name.
I think I will try to burn a disc for it to see if I can get a LiveCD going on my laptop - the previous LiveCD wouldn't boot on my laptop, and I'm interested to see if this one does.
Simon F
04-May-2011, 09:43
"It seems you do not have the hardware required to run Unity. Please choose Ubuntu Classic from the login screen ...."
Eh?! How new does the hardware have to be? Fresh out of the foundry?
They don't make it terribly obvious how you choose "ubuntu classic", but I did find it eventually.
Eh?! How new does the hardware have to be? Fresh out of the foundry?
They don't make it terribly obvious how you choose "ubuntu classic", but I did find it eventually.
It may depend on whether or not you already have the closed drivers from Nvidia/AMD installed? It works fine on my 5570 at any rate.
I used parts from my old pc to build some kind of media pc and hooked it up to my hdtv i switched from xp to 11.04 and im loving it . Fast even in compare to xp , looks modern and toons of usefull stuff in software ceneter. My only complain in regards to linux is still flash videos (youtube) dosent work as good as in windows os . i could watch 1080p vids on youtube without any problems on xp, on ubuntu they get choppy. Other then that its very fine os.
rpg.314
04-May-2011, 16:25
Eh?! How new does the hardware have to be? Fresh out of the foundry?
They don't make it terribly obvious how you choose "ubuntu classic", but I did find it eventually.
It works great even on old and crappy P4 chipsets, so I guess it must be driver issue.
Blazkowicz
04-May-2011, 19:15
weird that unity2D isn't included by default, maybe it will by next release.
here's a new default desktop with all new interaction, but you can't even try it in a virtual machine.
here's the new ubuntu, the distro for normal people. has issues that normal people fix by buying a new computer, but the new computer comes with the latest windows.
that's a bit wrong :)
I got sick and tired of Symantec Endpoint slowing the living daylights out of my work laptop, so I decided to take the plunge and install Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit and wow I just cannot believe it. What a difference! Loved the very cool and easy installation. Love the new UI for now. I have not worked with it too much as of right now to see whether it is something I would like to use all the time or whether I want to use Gnome 3.0 or KDE 4.x. Was a bit weirded out about how java is all symlinked around all over the place in /etc/ and /usr/bin folders and all that. I never really understood that. The naming of the directories where stuff gets installed never made sense to me. I like knowing that program files exist in a folder called...well Program Files lol. I guess it is something that I need to get used to. Love the apt-get feature of course. Typing in sudo passwords every 5 seconds does get a bit annoying I must say. I am using the ReiserFS instead of ext4 as of right now. Would anyone explain to me whether that was the right choice? I installed the OS as 3 different partitions: 1 for the /home 1 for the /root I think it was and then 2 gb for swap space. I am dual booting with Windows XP right now but frankly I think I will reclaim all the hard drive space by wiping out the partition for Windows once I am totally comfortable in Linux.
I don't see ReiserFS get recommended much and I think ext4 is becoming very popular. Android switched to it and most of the Linux distributions use it stock I think now too. Ubuntu has been on ext4 for several versions.
I've just installed the Hyves Desktop client on Ubuntu, which is amazing that it is even there. A surprising amount of apps now support Linux (I'm sure partly thanks to Mac OS/X and Linux being easily targetted at the same time, or Java applications or whatever). It is still not 100% user friendly though - this was a .bin file that I had to use chmod and such on from terminal.
Has anyone installed Gnome 3.0 on Natty yet? I just did and it's definitely more stable than compiz + Unity was on my laptop especially when running a Swing application like Intellij. But I do miss all the transparency and all that 3D fun stuff. I did install a window manager called Mutter which IIRC is based on Metacity but AFAIR I don't think that it does 3D stuff does it?
I installed 11.04 on my work box a few days ago. So far I've discovered that the GF6150 is blacklisted for Unity (there's a workaround but it may not be stable) and that Standby doesn't wake up (10.10 was fine). Oh Linux! ;) Performance on the 6150 is good though. I've tried the NV binaries and nouveau and they all work.
I'm not sure about Unity from an accessibility improvement standpoint but I'll stick with it for a bit.
Yeah I also discovered standby does not work. It goes to sleep but it never gets back up again. That was rather annoying.
I installed 11.04 on my work box a few days ago. So far I've discovered that the GF6150 is blacklisted for Unity (there's a workaround but it may not be stable) and that Standby doesn't wake up (10.10 was fine). Oh Linux! ;)
Meh, had to disable sleep mode when I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 ... it happens.
PS. although Ubuntu's release schedule does kinda force these things to slip through the cracks.
Yeah I also discovered standby does not work. It goes to sleep but it never gets back up again. That was rather annoying.
No issues with that here! Usually a graphics driver issue.
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