Welcome back to another issue of my reviews of Linux distributions. Not really surprisingly, this time I decided to take a close look at the second version of the most popular Debian offshoot, Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu’s performance probably was the biggest surprise that 2004 had in store for Linux users. Just 9 months ago, almost noone even knew that there was a new project underway, but then things went really fast: after a preview version in mid-September, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, released version 4.10 in October. Being based on Debian, Ubuntu has a solid base and, despite not being supported officially, all the (18.000) Debian packages available. Ubuntu 4.10 proved to be a decent operating system (especially for a first try) and had overall pretty positive reviews (here’s mine). But development of course didn’t stop there: soon enough, a subproject called Kubuntu was formed, with the goal to produce a KDE-centered version of Ubuntu (the original project decided to use the Gnome desktop exclusively). Now that six months have passed, the next version of Ubuntu Linux has arrived. Ubuntu 5.04 comes as a live CD and as a single installation CD. It is available for Intel/x86 architecture, for Apple (PowerPC) hardware and for AMD64, as is Kubuntu 5.04. The live CD was available for 4.10 too, but has improved significantly over the last six months (back then it merely was a version of the Gnoppix project with some Ubuntu artwork).
Let’s have a look at this new version of Ubuntu. Screenshots galore can be found, as usual, on shots.osdir.com. Even though Ubuntu 5.04 has only been around for a few days, I have used it since the preview version was released some weeks ago, so I really feel prepared enough to write a short article about it. Here we go:
Installation is still text-based, Ubuntu uses the new Debian installer, which is really fine (partitioning is always a bit tricky but you can ruin your harddrive with Fedora’s Anaconda too, I guess…). The Ubuntu developers have refined the installation here and there: the installer now asks for the correct keyboard layout and when you select a language other then English, Ubuntu asks if it should download the according internationalization packages. This was the first time that I didn’t have to do any further configuration regarding localization. Of course you need a fairly decent internet connection to do this (language packages are about 25MB). Ubuntu 5.04 comes with Linux kernel 2.6.10, x.org 6.8.2, Gnome 2.10, OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, Firefox 1.0.2, The Gimp 2.2.2, and Gaim 1.1.4 (KUbuntu features KDE 3.4 instead of Gnome 2.10). Overall, Ubuntu looks a lot like its predecessor. Artwork has not changed much, and Gnome 2.10 doesn’t look much different than 2.8. Also, Ubuntu 5.04 feels a lot like a refined version of Ubuntu 4.10. After using it for some time, you’ll notice the small tweaks here and there.
System stability is outstanding: I can’t recall seeing any application of the core Ubuntu system crash during the last weeks. This, however, does not extend to "Universe", the unsupported Debian Sid packages. Many of them will work flawlessly, some will make minor problems, some will not work at all (after all, these are just a snapshot of the Debian unstable tree – so you can’t really expect them to work). One very intersting task for the Ubuntu crew will be if they can stay close enough to Debian development, especially because Debian still has not released Sarge and is therefore stagnating a bit. Thus far, the concept to "take a snapshot of Sid and build upon it" has proved to be viable, but I think the long stabilization work on Sarge opens a gap between Debian and Ubuntu that gets larger every day. Debian will profit of Ubuntu far more as soon as they release Sarge and start development of "Etch", the next Debian version.
The most obvious change is startup time: Ubuntu 5.04 boots from Grub to GDM in 45 seconds on my notebook, plus another 22 to start Gnome. That’s 67 seconds combined, just over a minute. With Fedora Core 3, it took almost two and half minutes to start the same computer, Ubuntu 4.10 needed around two minutes to complete the boot process. Ubuntu 5.04 boots equally fast as Windows XP on my notebook. A very welcomed improvement!
After loggong in, the first thing I noticed was that the Ubuntu team changed the way Nautilus behaves: it closes every folder-window as soon as you double-click a subfolder in it. I don’t really like this because I think, to be really efficient with spatial browsing, you need to have menu structures that are so flat that you never have more than 3 windows open at the same time. Going back one level is more difficult now: instead of just closing the second window, you have to click in the left bottom of the window and select the superior folder level. Then the current window closes and the window with the superior level reappears. Strange and not very intuitive. I’d still say: either spatial all the way or no spatial at all. But I had to switch back to navigational browsing anyway (yes, after writing a very pro-spatial-browsing article last year): nowadays, I manage two websites and I have to keep local copies of them on my harddrive. I didn’t create these websites in the first place and they both feature really stupid and deep folder structures. Now I can’t quite change them to a more intelligent structure because that would break all the external sites that link to sections of these websites. I still think that spatial browsing is a superior and easier concept if you do it from the start but of course it sucks with deep nested folder structures and I can’t do anything about it. Plus I am quite comfortable with navigational browsing anyway and Nautilus makes it easy to change to this behaviour. I really think that this is not an issue anymore: you can change it with a simple click, and Nautilus is both in spatial as in navigational mode a really fine file manager.
A nice improvement is the new Gnome Volume Control. It’s a lot easier now, with just two sliders. Also, I like the new Gnome System Tools: the network manager works perfectly: it detects new WLAN access points, so connecting to them is way easier than before. Oh yeah, and Ubuntu configured my Netgear WG511 802.11g wireless card automatically: no more downloading firmware – a pleasant surprise!
Of course, there is also some new software: Canonical added an update manager that works really fine and integrates nicely with the desktop. Synaptic still serves a the central tool to add/remove software and update the system (and it does its job), but the simplicity of the update manager is nice, especially for non-tech-savvy users. They can keep their system up-to-date with two mouseclicks.
The biggest plus for me is that, finally, I have a Linux distribution that does software audio mixing automatically. I have complained about this issue several times in my previous articles. Ubuntu 5.04 finally does it right. No further configuration was needed, out-of-the-box Rhythmbox, Beep Media Player (change output to ESD, otherwise it crashes!), Gaim, Totem and the Gnome System Sounds play simultanously. Good job, Ubuntu team!
Graveman solves another long standing problem with the Gnome Desktop. Finally, it’s easy to burn Audio CDs in Gnome (as easy as "apt-get install graveman"). Still not part of the official Gnome Desktop (and also not part of Ubuntu 5.04!), at least it’s GTK+ based application that integrates nicely into the Desktop, a nice complement to the nautilus-cd-burner, which already does a fine job at burning normal data discs. I can really recommend Graveman, it worked for me flawlessly on several occasions.
Another long standing issue with Linux (on notebooks) that seems to be (at least partly) solved is power management. The Logout/Shutdown dialog now offers a new option called "Hibernate the computer". This, however, doesn’t work on my Compaq Presario 2800, the computer instantly freezes and never comes back, due to a broken ACPI implementation on this notebook. This is obviously not Ubuntu’s fault, I always had this problem and there’s even a way to fix it (but it says: "Handle with care" and I never got myself to finally risk it). However, I do hope that this option works for most other notebook users.
Final verdict: Ubuntu 5.04 won’t disappoint most Linux users. A lot of things "just work". I didn’t find any grave problems, Ubuntu 5.04 is a worthy successor to 4.10, slicker, faster and more stable. Special Kudos to the Ubuntu team that they try to tackle the tough, long-standing Linux-on-Desktop problems like power management and startup time. They are really pushing Linux forward in this area. The future looks bright for Ubuntu Linux, especially if Debian finally manages to push out Sarge and the developers can combine their forces and concentrate on all the new technology that didn’t make it into Sarge.
About the Author:
Christian Paratschek, 29 (since yesterday, ugh), self-employed IT worker, irregularly writes and translates articles for this site. Read more on his website.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
Thats a pretty good review. I like Ubuntu 5.04 also, the layout is nice and it detected my soundcard/nic/mosue and just about everything else so I can’t complain about that. I just have some minor gripes about trying to compile a certain application to the newer version because I’m stubborn and didn’t want to use the older version thats in the repositories.
Oh, one more thing to note. Its probably not a good idea to mess with sound settings, I found out the hard way per ubuntuguide.org. In short, its along the lines of wanting alsa and esd, like having my cake and eating it too. Now I gotta figure out how to make the two work together again
I like ubuntu’s philosophy and sane defaults. The aesthetics are also unique, but those who prefer a different look may easily change to one of the other preinstalled themes.
The part that I found kind of hairy… is that, to get the level of functionality that many come to expect from a desktop OS, you have to enable external package repositories. Following the documenation on http://www.ubuntuguides.org, I was able to install just about everything I needed… but this came at the cost of stability. Enabling GLX and the nvidia driver, in addition installing some multimedia packages, left my system highly unstable. The machine locked up frequently at seemingly random times.
Oddly, I have not experienced the same level of instability using the same software titles and NVIDIA GLX on other distros. Particularly, Xandros and Linspire (both debian-based) worked fine. Even my Gentoo install, using all “unstable”/”bleeding edge” sources exhibited greater stability.
regardless, I enjoyed what I saw in Ubuntu, and i look forward to their future releases. I would just suggest that they try to expand their Ubuntu-repositories, so i wont have to “taint” the install with unsupported debian packages.
..can’t say much more than that. Great job.
I am a little bit disappointed by Ubuntu’s security.
Hoary’s Firefox 1.0.2 still has unpatched critical security bugs which are fixed in Firefox 1.0.3 but so far they neither updated to 1.0.3 nor did they backport the missing secutiry patches. These are issues the Firefox devs called “critical”.
Warty’s Firefox looks even worse.
So far the only security update in Hoary has been an updated kdelibs package last week. This package is broken and uninstallable. Not yet fixed.
I understand that most Ubuntu developers attent the conference this week but I would have hoped for a faster response time when the browser of a desktop distro has citical issues. At least some information about this would have been nice.
The sound config in Hoary is probably the only thing I don’t like about Ubuntu. According to bug 7565 it was decided that only esound should be used for sound, which is a really bad choice (doesn’t work well with video, for example).
Ehm, hoary’s firefox has the fixes backported.
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/#viewubuntuscreenshots
I helped a friend install Linux on his laptop this week. He was having trouble installing Suse. I found Suse’s installer to be reallly slow and a bit confusiing. Maybe I’m just used to the Debian installer…
Anyway, I took over and installed Ubuntu on it. TBH, I was aching to try it out
I was really impressed with how easy and straight forward the installer was and how quickly it installed. Even though I was a KDE fan before switching to Mac OS X, I found the GNOME environment really nice. Installing packages was a snap too. If I ever get an x86 box again, I’ll deffinately install Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is the best Debian theme ever !!
Most of the speed improvements aren’t Ubuntu specific. A lot of it stem from the fact that GNOME has gotten much faster, GNOME-2.10 that is.
“Ubuntu is the best Debian theme ever !!”
debian theme. i like that, couldnt hav said it better myself. like xandros, linspire, libranet. all just THEMES for the best base OS out there.
The free desktop is looking better and better. This is
one of the best I have seen so far.
However, I really agree with the auther on the window closing behavior. Is this a “bright” ideda of the Ubuntu team or should I send a bug report to the Gnome people?
What was wrong with the Gnome 2.8 spatial model? The disappearance of open windows as new ones are opened gives the desktop a nerveous feel. In a spatial desktop, things should stay put. If you want windows to close, as you open new ones, you would better use the navigational model.
By the way, does anybody know if there is any way to turn it off e.g. in GConf.
SUCK!
Change it here:
gconf
apps
autiluspreferences
o_ubuntu_spatial
“However, I really agree with the auther on the window closing behavior. Is this a “bright” ideda of the Ubuntu team or should I send a bug report to the Gnome people?”
It’s a bright idea by Mark Shuttleworth himself.
And yes, there is a gconf key:
apps -> nautilus -> preference -> no_ubuntu_spatial
However, I really agree with the auther on the window closing behavior. Is this a “bright” ideda of the Ubuntu team or should I send a bug report to the Gnome people?
This is Ubuntu’s “bright” idea. There is an extensive debate going on in Ubuntu Bugzilla:
http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8516
By the way, does anybody know if there is any way to turn it off e.g. in GConf.
The gconf key is here:
/apps/nautilus/preferences/no_ubuntu_spatial
appsnautiluspreferencesno_ubuntu_spatial
THANK YOU!! It wasn’t there the first day or two this “feature” made it into the repositories, and I haven’t followed it since. Nice to know you can revert back to the real way.
Probably a bad release of Nvidia. I’ve had major issues with 7174 (I think), and it seems to be the only one that works with kernel 2.6.11. I ended up dropping back to an older nvidia driver and 2.6.10. I’ll upgrade when someone swears it won’t break me again.
[/i]This is Ubuntu’s “bright” idea. There is an extensive debate going on in Ubuntu Bugzilla:[/i]
There’s no debate at all. The whole thing was the idea of the rich guy who signs the checks at Ubuntu, and he said it isn’t going to change. Game over.
I do not understand all this buzz around Ubuntu lately. Sure, it is ok distro with very nicely selected packages, but that’s about it. There are problems on my machine with Ubuntu that I have not seen before with any other distro I tried. X windows just fail to start and all I get is a blank screen right away after install. After some configuration at xorg.conf it’s all fine, but that certainly was not the best first impression i’ve had. My network did not seem to be recognized automatically and there were some other minor gliches. Warty, Hoary- all of them showed exactly the same. Im a bit dissapointed with Ubuntu, but because it is such a young distro I’m willing to wait a year and maybe then give it another go. As it matures and the hype decreases it actually might turn into a fine distro- somewhere in my top 10.
The part that I found kind of hairy… is that, to get the level of functionality that many come to expect from a desktop OS, you have to enable external package repositories. Following the documenation on http://www.ubuntuguides.org, I was able to install just about everything I needed… but this came at the cost of stability. Enabling GLX and the nvidia driver, in addition installing some multimedia packages, left my system highly unstable. The machine locked up frequently at seemingly random times.
Well, I don’t know what to tell you about the Nvidia drivers (I have a laptop and a desktop that uses those drivers all day and I only get crashes when I mess with xcompmgr). But as for the other things, I advise that you stay away from debian repositories. The backports repo has everything like that:
http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/size.php
I know what the Ubuntuguide says, but he doesn’t tell you to use the backport repo because of a spat with the backports in the past.
Hey Christian Paratschek, this was a good review. Thanks.
Thanks! I’ll def. check that out! =)
________
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you about the Nvidia drivers (I have a laptop and a desktop that uses those drivers all day and I only get crashes when I mess with xcompmgr). But as for the other things, I advise that you stay away from debian repositories. The backports repo has everything like that:
http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/size.php
I know what the Ubuntuguide says, but he doesn’t tell you to use the backport repo because of a spat with the backports in the past.”
Ill stay with my Gentoo, dont even try…
I was actually thinking of switching….
i’d like if they put “use autoscrolling” by default on firefox…
If your going to put out some figures like boot times. Please list the hardware that you are using for this distrobution. It helps the reader guage if this particular distro/release will be adequate for their particular set up.
Just my humbile opinion
PS: sorry if I sound a tad bit rude, it is not intended.
A like the idea of spatial here in Ubuntu, rember in Warty if you click a folder with the middle mouse button it will open the new folder closing the parent, now in Hoary it’s the opposite if you clik a folder with the middle mouse button the parent folder still open.
…file a bug report. Seriously. If Ubuntu doesn’t work out of the box on your hardware and you’re sure that it should (there are Linux drivers, if works on other distros, you’ve fixed it yourself), it’s a bug. Please file a bug report.
There aren’t going to be (m)any other people out there with the exact same configuration as you, so if you don’t report it, it may never be fixed. So get off your butt, and do something to help.
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/
The sound config in Hoary is probably the only thing I don’t like about
Ubuntu. According to bug 7565 it was decided that only esound should be used
for sound, which is a really bad choice (doesn’t work well with video, for
example).
I don’t think esd is a particular bad choice for a sound server, but if you do
not require software mixing, you can easily disable esd (System -> Preferences
-> Sound, uncheck “Enable sound server startup) and are left with plain
ALSA…
By the way, you can tell many apps that do not use esd by default (like
mplayer for instance) to actually do so (“mplayer -ao esd …” or edit
/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf). That works very well on my machine…
> Ehm, hoary’s firefox has the fixes backported.
No, as I wrote, it has *some* of the fixes but not all. Have a look at the ubuntuforums, they have more detailed information on it, including results of test cases with the Ubuntu firefox 1.0.2. It has still unfixed critical security issues. Especially that java script issue is concerning. That is the reason jdong (thank you very much) made it a top priority to get firefox 1.0.3 (form SID without the Ubuntu patches) into his backport repository.
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9926
https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9927
And the 0.9.3 from Warty got less love and has more unfixed issues.
You want the new Firefox for Hoary? Here it is:
http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/backports/dists/hoary-backports-s…
Install at your own risk. Kinda like breakmyubuntu
The installer is borked, gnome freezzzzzzzes hard-solid for no reason, Firefox dies every 20 minutes or has a spasm and uses 150 meg of ram and won’t respond, DMA on CD/DVD drives are off by default and not easy to turn on. Countless people are having their Master boot records hosed on or after install, not to mention the countless others that get a blank screen upon booting the first time! I hardly call that Outstanding Stability. If only I could get it to install! First off, the partitioning tool doesn’t work properly if you already have linux partitions, it won’t let you select which ones to format or not, sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t. It won’t let you write grub to anywhere but the MBR and not even that’s guaranteed, I mean it won’t even let you write a boot floppy for Christ’s sake!
Then after countless hours screwing around trying to get the stupid thing to boot, it freezes loging into to Gnome – type my name, password and wham, locked hard, solid, kaput, run down the curtains, it was a dead parrot! And I’m not the only one, go read their forums. Tried it on my 3 year old generic lappy and got the same problems – Nope, not Outstanding Stability here boy’o noway Jose! These 6 month release cycles are nuts, there’s no way you can test things to a satisfactory level in 6 months, I don’t care how good you think you are!
Maybe this distribution just isn’t your cup of tea?
Did you try to install it more than once or just gave up right away?
Report a bug perhaps?
There are many alternatives to just complaining. Complaining doesn’t fix a problem. If you want something that “just works”, you have to work at it. There are products that have been around for years that don’t work all the time. Sometimes I wake up and put my pants on backwards. It happens. It is a bug in my programming. But I sure hope that no one will have me removed because I don’t function properly all the time.
Why I still recommend Mandriva to my friends:
– It has a very fast and userfiendly instalaltion and partition management.
– It has a very good locale support
– DMA on by default
– mp3 and other codecs on by default
– control center, tools and wizards
– detection and automounting of windows partitions
– No X freezes
– Splash screen and faster boot (yes, faster than hoary)
– Keyboard switcher actualy works in Gnome and KDE
Of course, mandriva lacks some professional look and has some glitches, but it’s way more configured out of the box than Hoary.
I still use Ubuntu and think, that it is best disto for now, but I cant be so optimistic as Christian Paratschek. Boot time for me is still far away from windoze (about 2 mins). Nautilus hangs a lot. Uses sometimes a lot of pcu, even I am doing nothing. After install there was no 1024×768 possible, so I needed to edit Xorg manually. No fresh updates for Gimp and OpenOffice. Sometimes it is not possible to open CD-rom…
But hardware detection and hotplug is amazing. Automatic updates too.
The official repository could have more dev packages (ide’s) to suit my personal taste.Other than that it’s a notably good distro.Worth to mention is the hardware report database tool.A lot of good little things that might benefit the whole community.
Sometimes it is not possible to open CD-rom…
I noticed that in the new release too. I was mad at first, then I figured out the plan- this is on purpose to copy Macs. Gnome no longer wants you to hit the CDrom drive’s open button, but to instead right click on the CD icon on the desktop and tell it to eject. It will always pop out when there is no CD. This is a new feature to prevent accedentaly opening the CD drive.
Gees, you went through a lot of unnecessary shit…All I did was put a CD in, booted up and installed, and everything just worked.
Sounds like the problem is between the chair and the PC.
how dare you use the word ‘garbage’ TWICE! I am reporting you….
Exactly. Ubuntu Linux just works. Better and more simply than any other distribution I have tried.