Ubuntu 10.04 is out now

[Rolf N]

After a bit of last-minute rejiggling, the actual, proper and final disc images are out now, hot off the press:
http://www.ubuntu.com
http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04/

Have not installed the final release yet, but I've read around a bit.

It's all shiny and new yadda yadda.

Main items of note:

• Window control placement for minimize/maximize/close icons has been shifted over to the left. But as this is a per-theme setting, switching to a different theme is an easy enough fix.
• The weird obsession with graphical boot splashes is still ongoing. After usplash and xplash, we have yet another atrocity to deal with: Plymouth. Unfortunately, apt dependencies prevent proper removal (yet again). The current best practice to suppress it is as follows:
  sudo chmod -x /bin/plymouth /sbin/plymouthd
  (this marks plymouth binaries as non-executable, which will produce one harmless warning on boot, with no further impact on system functionality)
• After the move to kernel mode switching for graphics modes, a shifting of that particular responsibility away from the x server, there were (still are?) issues with power management especially on ATI graphics hardware, leading to excessive clocks and heat. Excercise particular caution when installing on a laptop. This may already be resolved in the final, but don't say you weren't warned.

edit: actually I wanted to install this on my notebook tonight, but the poor little thing seems to be dead after 6 weeks of not being used at all. Note to self: neglect can kill electronics. Don't know how to provide first impressions if I don't have a machine to install it on ...

 

[Simon F]

Thanks for passing on the notice. I'll kick off an upgrade now. (Now if only there was a Linux distribution that was 32-bit but used the 64-bit gcc library source code)

 

[Rolf N]

Thanks for passing on the notice. I'll kick off an upgrade now. (Now if only there was a Linux distribution that was 32-bit but used the 64-bit gcc library source code)

Are those different branches now? I know you can install the IA32 libs on a 64bit system and "crosscompile" IA32 apps that way. I've actually built Win32 apps on a 64bit Ubuntu system at one point
... but what is the benefit of going the other direction?

 

[Florin]

Upgrading my laptop at work.. getting between 5 MB and 10 MB/s downloads. Ubuntu's got their stuff together these days.

Meanwhile my home machine is limping along at low end ADSL speeds.

 

[Simon F]

Are those different branches now? I know you can install the IA32 libs on a 64bit system and "crosscompile" IA32 apps that way. I've actually built Win32 apps on a 64bit Ubuntu system at one point
... but what is the benefit of going the other direction?

Yes, I've built 32-bit programs on our 64-bit machines at work, but for the experimental, 32-bit Ubuntu box, I really want to build 32-bit programs where the standard c libraries etc has used the source code of the 64-bit libraries.

The reason is that the x86 32-bit libm is wrong, at least for trigonometric functions, and the development team have absolutely no intention of fixing it. The main developer has even told me that he's even been asked to put the same bug into the 64-bit source code!

Upgrading my laptop at work.. getting between 5 MB and 10 MB/s downloads. Ubuntu's got their stuff together these days..

I'd say their servers are getting hammered at the moment The initial estimate was that the download would take ~40minutes on our connection, but that soon was revised to fluctuate between 8 and 22 hrs!

 

[fehu]

New themes are really ugly and put some trouble changing the height of top and bottom panels
i know that's the least important things, but with close button on the left and some other changes i feel that too much things are out of place

 

[Rolf N]

New themes are really ugly and put some trouble changing the height of top and bottom panels
i know that's the least important things, but with close button on the left and some other changes i feel that too much things are out of place

Can't you just switch your theme back to Clearlooks and be good again?
Has the logon screen changed at all since 9.10? Does it still default to "face browser" style?

 

[Grall]

I'd say their servers are getting hammered at the moment

They're not using Bittorrent?

That'd be an ideal method really, the more people who wants something the greater the aggregate network bandwidth, and the faster it will get spread around the swarm... Pretty much the obvious behavior compared to central fileservers that everybody else download from.

 

[Simon F]

They're not using Bittorrent?

That's not going to be an option for people such as myself who are behind a company firewall.

 

[Rolf N]

Of course, torrents are available and should be used if at all possible. Check the second link in the op and scroll all the way down

After handing my Travelmate 8371 over to the RMA gods, I've installed my "big" system fresh on a spare harddrive I had lying around. Will transfer all my data from the old one later. I figured this is the best way to avoid headaches.

I've gone with the Xubuntu flavor. Logon is still the "rewritten for awesome technology" version of gdmgreeter, i.e. a facebrowser, and a fugly one at that, with none of the old customization options. I miss Xubuntu 9.04's logon prompt. So professional. Oh well.

I can confirm that close buttons left or right or titles in the center, window bars with bits cut out and all other sorts of crazy shit can still be configured freely and easily through theme mechanisms in the "Appearance" and "Window Manager" categories of the settings manager. Baseline Ubuntu is bound to have the same functionality. So this really shouldn't be a reason to avoid this distro [version].

Another newish thing I've noticed is that ext4 is now the default-default, with no more warnings and double-checks as still used to be the case in the last round.

Catfish is new I believe. It's a search tool, seems neat. It doesn't seem to integrate with Thunar (Xubuntu's default file manager) at all, but might be properly plugged into Nautilus (Ubuntu's default file manager).
Ubuntu Software Center is the latest attempt to wrap package management in a "friendlier", categorized, colorful noob interface. Looks ok. I just don't think I'm the target demographic for this.

Network manager seems to suck less. Unfortunately, as my Notebook is out, I can't report on wireless. I hope they've made connection hopping (wired/wireless) while keeping the same IP (for SSH) a little easier to deal with.
*fingers crossed*

Oh, and Firefox 3.6.3 is the shipping default, with the silly "Shiretoko" branding gone.

Installing Netbeans and openoffice now.

 

[fehu]

Can't you just switch your theme back to Clearlooks and be good again?
Has the logon screen changed at all since 9.10? Does it still default to "face browser" style?

I have installed a new one on another computer so i must experiment a little more, but can't fin how to put buttons on the right, and usually i use a modified orange theme, with transparency and some other things that don't work really well

 

[rpg.314]

I'd say their servers are getting hammered at the moment

That happens with EVERY ubuntu release.

 

[rpg.314]

On a side note, it is good to see that I am not the only linux dude out here. :|

 

[Simon F]

That happens with EVERY ubuntu release.

I think the last time I upgraded the system it went through 4 different versions in one day so I guess I don't tend to keep up to date

 

[Mize]

Anyone know which build of mythtv's backend 10.04 is hooked to? All my front-ends are macs so I won't upgrade unless there is an os x front end of the same build.

nevermind...10.04 uses 0.23 and there's a mac build of the frontend out there...

 

[Rolf N]

After a bit of use, the only issue I have is that the desktop is uncomfortably sluggish with compositing on. Yes, that's using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, just like I did before on 9.04 where performance was ok. Weird.

I'm more than a bit peeved that Thunderbird has import/export functions, but it cannot import mail and settings from ... itself! All FAQs point to "copy this and that from your old profile folder into your new profile folder", but that doesn't really work between different versions of Thunderbird, and even when it does, it's still an ugly hack. And it's not even just about the mail itself, but the settings. I have 5 active mail accounts on 4 different mail servers and at least 9 addresses (counting aliases). Setting this whole thing up again has been a pain.
This is hardly the fault of the distro, but still something that might come up for people looking to migrate.

A positive surprise to me was that the system now comes with a default music player that actually works! Exaile understands m3u playlists with relative paths, and it can actually play music, like, from files on a disk, without first vomiting "collections" and "libraries" all over the place. Yay for technology!

Evolution and brasero are both still garbage and not worth the download bandwidth to keep them updated. I can recommend ... urr, with certain limitations, Thunderbird for mail and k3b for burning optical media.

I've also had a quick look at the GIMP (2.6) default interface and had the distinct sensation of being mocked when it opened 3 windows. Gnome people just can't be helped when it comes to that. Someone needs to write a rogue user interface for that program sometime.

Otherwise everything seems to work ok. Sound and printing just worked right away.

 

[Florin]

My main issue is that there don't seem to be VMware tools for Xorg 7.6.6 yet, or at least not for Vsphere (rumour has it the Lucid alpha had no such probs in VMware WS), but that's hardly Ubuntu's fault.

I also like Plymouth to be honest, never understood why anyone thought it was interesting for the default to be several screens worth of debug info

 

[Rolf N]

I also like Plymouth to be honest, never understood why anyone thought it was interesting for the default to be several screens worth of debug info

It's useful especially in instances where the system can't boot. It's also kind of necessary to inform the user of a forced file system check. You can't expect people to just sit there twiddling their thumbs for 3~5 minutes without producing some sort of message telling them what's up.

Word on the street is that plymouth itself is kind of rough and alphaish, and it's not entirely clear how it could get into an LTS release. There have been reports that it causes its own boot issues in the wild, where systems would hang with plymouth active (obscuring the cause of error), but boots fine with it suppresed, as described in the op.

I just don't see the point. The average boot process takes half a minute, if that. Why would I want to look at a boot splash in that time, to be artistically stimulated? No. Diagnostics at least have a use, even if it's circumstantial.

 

[Npl]

Well, been some time till I could use a new Ubuntu without running into bugs within minutes... last version had a broken wget killing lots of scripts and some versions before I couldnt even connect to the net without killing the new "network manager".
Runnin it in Virtualbox now, might install it natively if it keeps up its good first impression.

Rolf N: yeah I had to transfer setting for some relatives. Thunderbird can do a decent job if you want to import from other clients installed on the system but has no support to fetch data from a previous installation. Was horrible to transfer over old mails from Outlook Express given that Windows 7 doesnt have that program anymore. Wish everyone just used Opera like myself, that can easily im/export when you just point it to the directories.

 

[Rolf N]

Weird. I have always used wget a ton, and didn't encounter any issues with it, starting with Ubuntu 6.10 until now. The only release I skipped was 9.10, but even that I still installed on my laptop, just didn't use it extensively.

The thing that helps with network-manager is to check the "Available to all users on this system" (or somesuch) box in the connection properties. That makes it more of an old-style system-wide setting, and is the default in 10.04 as far as I can tell. All I really had to do this time around was assign an IP.
Wireless was already much better in 9.10 than it was in 9.04. Connections (w/ "Available to all users") were established before logon, as it should be. If it behaves the same again, I could live with that.