It’s that time of year again: a new Ubuntu release (or Kubuntu, if that’s your thing). Canonical has just released Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. This is a long term support release, meaning its supported period is far longer than that of normal releases. It comes with the latest and greatest the Free software world has to offer, while also adding some Ubuntu-specific features, of course.
“Ubuntu 10.04 LTS challenges the perceptions of the Linux desktop, bringing a whole new category of users to the world of Ubuntu,” said Jane Silber, Canonical’s CEO, “Changes like the new look and feel and the addition of a music store, layered on top of our relentless focus on delivering an intuitive and attractive user experience for new and existing Ubuntu users – these are the bridging elements to the mainstream market that our community, our partners and our users really want. Long-term support makes Ubuntu 10.04 LTS very attractive to corporate IT as well.”
Starting at the beginning (literally): boot time has been improved considerably. I personally switched to the Luid Lynx branch a few days ago, and noticed the improved boot speed right away on my machine. Applications seem to start faster too, and Compiz performance has been jacked up too – although it could also be they tweaked the default duration times for the effects.
Another major focus is this whole “Social from the start” business. They’ve inlcuded something called the “Me menu” from which you can administer al your social networking and IM stuff. “The new ‘Me Menu’ in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS consolidates the process of accessing and updating social networks including Facebook, Digg, Twitter and Identi.ca,” the release notes detail, “The Me Menu also integrates chat channels so users can talk with friends or colleagues on Google Talk, MSN, IRC and nearly every network.”
Sadly, the Me menu breaks as soon as you switch to anything but the default icon theme – even if the icon theme you switched to is in the repositories.
The same applies to the fancy new tray icons they designed and added to this release. Instead of making this pervasive (i.e., part of the panel) these icons are just a theme, and as soon as you switch themes, the beautiful icons disappear. It would be nice if they were available no matter the theme you chose, as a unified look for tray icons is a very welcome addition.
All the artwork has been updated in this release – from the mentioned tray icons all the way to the boot screen. Personally, I detest the graphical theme with a passion, but the new boot screen is really nice. Luckily, this is Linux, so a new theme is just a few clicks or commands away (sudo apt-get install gnome-colors shiki-colors).
It comes with version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, and GNOME 2.30 for Ubuntu, and KDE SC 4.4 for Kubuntu.
Changes like the titlebar buttons, all on the left side now. Pretty annoying when you have clicked on the right for the past 15 years. Ah, and Nautilus, I didn’t test it, but I bet it is not able to lasso files in list view, again.
Took all of two seconds to get used to here, and if it hadn’t it’d take all of two more seconds to open up preferences and move it to the right.
run gconf-editor (as user)
apps/metacity/general/button_layout
menu:minimize,maximize,close
will put it back to the right side.
(the editor gives a short description)
I’ve been running Lucid since late in the beta cycle. I had some stability problems at first (hey it was a beta after all) but they’ve been ironed out. There are a few minor quirks that bug me but that’s true of all oses. It’s snappy, it lets me do what I need to do, and most importantly of all it annoys me less than OS X or Windows. This is the first release, imho, that actually feels like they’re on the right track and taking details into account for the most part. Now, if they can just keep it up…
I got a complete kernel lockup with the new version. But I’m sure it will eventually ironed out. I put a 10.04 ubuntu installation on this netbook for my mom: http://www.osnews.com/story/22033/Review_HP_1120NR_Netbook
Ouch. I take it the kernel lock-up wasn’t on the netbook you mentioned?
Yes, it was on that netbook. Previous release did not have the problem.
Hmm, I remember there being a bug involving some HP motherboards with some earlier 2.6 kernel versions. Hopefully that one hasn’t reared its ugly head again. Did it lock up on boot, or later on? Did it panic or just lock?
Hi,
I have the same HP Mini the only difference is LA because is Latin American, I have installed Ubuntu 10.4 Remix Works Ok
Agreed. I stopped using Ubuntu a few years back but returned a couple of weeks ago with the beta and have been incredibly impressed since. For me it’s been very fast, stable and everything just seems to work. Great job to everyone involved.
I sincerely wish people would quantify statements like that because they’re becoming older and more tired with every release.
Loosely translated, that means “It has nowhere near the features, functionality and applications of Windows and OS X, but hey, it doesn’t annoy me!” and I’m afraid that simply isn’t good enough.
Doesn’t really say much, does it?
Edited 2010-04-29 22:57 UTC
Uh, and why do I care if my comment is good enough for *you*? I don’t even know you. Sorry but I’m not losing any sleep over your arrogance. I wish people like you would not put words in my mouth that I didn’t say. If it didn’t have all the functionality I’ve become used to over the years from *NIX to Windows to OS X, then it would very much annoy me. Duh. As for applications, well that’s just something you face when you use an alternate os: you have to also find alternate applications. Again, duh. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. Imho, concentrating on open standards and data formats is much more important than fighting over which os people use. It was just my opinion, it’s not like I was attempting to pass off my one-liner as a scientific study. Get a life.
And while you’re at it, I wish you would quantify your statement of less functionality.
Talk about pot calling the kettle black.
Doesn’t really say much, does it? [/q]
Is that not why I said this was the first time I felt they were actually starting to pay attention to detail? It took them fscking long enough, on that we agree at least. They aren’t yet paying *enough* attention to the overall detail of the system, on that we also seem to agree. Note that my standard of system-wide detail is set by OS X and the way *all* the core applications integrate with each other. I’ve not found any os yet that has that level of integration, neither Ubuntu nor Windows even come close to that.
And finally, annoyance is very much a factor when you’re in front of the computer all the time. Remember this: all oses suck. Which one is right for you just depends on which one you think sucks the least. Let’s move on and concentrate on fighting for open data formats and royalty-free standards so that it doesn’t matter, and no one need ever give a damn, about which os other people use.
edit: Accidentally hit the submit button too early.
Edited 2010-04-30 08:59 UTC
Sorry sweetheart, but you’re not painting this as my personal opinion. That’s why I asked people to quantify statements like yours above.
If you can give me some usage statistics regarding Ubuntu and that people are ditching OS X or Windows for it in particular (you’re the one making unqualified statements about it annoying *you* less than OS X or Windows as if that should be relevant for others), then I stand by my statement that it simply isn’t good enough.
It’s as simple as that.
You quite clearly are sunshine.
But you did say write things and it is always painted in a way where it somehow applies to other people, even though the words ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’ are used. It’s getting ever more sad the more releases of Ubuntu we have.
You are so far out of your depth it isn’t even funny. Ubuntu has no applications. Users finding applications is just laughable. Comparable applications simply aren’t there.
Nobody is using it sunshine apart from sad little weenies who think it annoys them ‘less’ with every release. I’ve seen no evidence that people are ditching OS X or Windows for it, there’s my qualification.
How many releases have we had, and what is specifically different about this release than the last – apart from even more OS X worship?
OS X worship in the form of switching your window controls around is going to get you nowhere. If you’re replicating OS X badly then what chance have you got?
You previously quoted someone and yourself said:
When they say that they don’t understand why they have to care if their comment is good enough for you, that is what they mean.
Either you are just being dense or just trolling.
I think you need to get over this OS X thing. The layout has looked like this in GNOME since 2.0.
GNOME has always taken some inspiration from OS X to a degree, it’s nothing new to Ubuntu. If you just want to take the titlebar positions and the monochrome systemtray icons as some direct copy then that’s just sad.
Ubuntu my look similar to OS X but it’s not OS X by any stretch. It’s more configurable for one start and at least you can change the default look easy enough(unlike OS X). Your choice is to make it look not like OS X, if it was hard-coded like that then fair enough. It just seems to me like most people, you’re just taking small parts of what looks like OS X and saying it’s some distro that does OS X worship, when really it’s nothing like OS X and the work flow is totally different.
After reading Phoronix’s article about the improved boot times, I can’t wait to download and try it.
Thanks for the news!
Yes it boots fast, but honestly I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It boots five seconds faster, so what? I’m honestly asking here since I don’t get it, exactly what is the big obsession with boot times? Maybe it’s just the way I use a computer, but I rarely reboot my desktop or laptop. In the case of my laptop (well, netbook) I put it into suspend, and resuming from that is quicker than any cold boot. It’s not like that extra five or so seconds is going to make or break whatever you’re doing.
Well, after seeing some benchmarks I can definitely say it’s not “just 5 seconds” faster… Much more than that. :O
And to be honest, it’s not just the boot times that attract me. Looking at the new features page*, the whole OS looks very modern and slick.
* http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/1004features
No one’s arguing it’s a good os… at least not yet. Patience, they’ll start soon.
But I timed my machine, and it was only five seconds faster, so maybe for some reason I just didn’t have as slow of a boot on previous releases as others did. Even so, I still don’t get the boot time fixation, and it’s not just with Linux. Well, I get it in Vista’s case since it was dog slow to boot, but in all the other cases I just don’t get what a few seconds is in the scheme of things.
Well, boot times are not so important, but neverthless – it’s still worse on Debian than any other distro [Slack/Arck/Gentoo in particular]. All the trash Mark had put into the startup scripts makes it just slow, and that’s a Debian nature to be just slower than others.
10.04 actually boots faster than my previous Arch setup (which had most daemons backgrounded). Maybe give it a try?
Hmm, sounds interresting. I think I’ll give it a try, as I normally use Arch/*BSDs setup.
It’s always good to revise your knowledge, isn’t it?
Fixed that for ya. OTOH, I’ll be apt-get dist-upgrading my laptop tonight to try 10.04 out.
That would be cool. I hope it will actually work better *even* on slower HW specs.
Regards
And it turned ugly real fast. The system came up with no video, and would not let me switch to a different tty. After several hours of screwing around, I reinstalled from scratch, which had the added bonus of having no sound in videos, and having to restore my home dir from backup due to it being encrypted…
Damn you Ubuntu!
Did you upgrade using update-manager or do-release-upgrade ?
You mention “apt-get dist-upgrading”, apt-get dist-upgrade is not a supported release upgrade procedure and is likely to cause problems.
I’m with you on this one. My desktop which I use at work and do all my software development on has avg uptimes of 30-60 days between reboots.
As for my laptop at home. I suspend to disk and it starts up pretty instant when I lift the lid.
Linux is rock solid and hardly ever requires a reboot – unlike other OSes. 😉
I use all of the 3 big OSs. And I think I have to reboot my Ubuntu machine the most often. The reason is, that software updates ask me to do it. X.org locking up is also not that rare. And restarting X is like a reboot to me.
Do not forget about PulseAudio/ALSA lock-ups when only reboot brings the sound back.
So far haven’t had that one with the latest Pulseaudio, but even when it did I’ve never needed a reboot to fix it. Killall pulseaudio && pulseaudio & does the trick nicely. Hardly optimal I agree, but better than what happens when Win7’s audio subsystem crashes (not a frequent occurrance thankfully, but no way other than a reboot to recover when it does).
At work the desktop Windows machine takes well over three minutes to boot. Each morning I switch it on and I make myself a cup of coffe rather than waiting for it. If I am hosting a meeting in the meeting room, and another meeting has just gone before mine, I find it vey embarassing taking five minutes of meeting time just to get a Windows computer up and running and working with the meeting room projector.
I had occasion to restore Windows 7 on a Toshiba laptop recently. After the install of the bare Windows OS, which itself required a couple of re-boots, the Toshiba restore setup went into a cycle of “Configuring System” (which was actually installing machine-specific drivers), and after each new driver was installed, the machine automatically re-booted. Then I installed Windows security Essentials, and then did a complete Windows Update, and then I installed a few applications which also required re-boot. All up the entire process must have required about twenty re-boots. It took many, many hours, and it was a thoroughly harrowing experience.
I installed Kubuntu Lucid on my own main desktop last week. It took two re-boots in total … once to boot the liveCD, and a second re-boot to boot the newly-installed OS from the hard drive. The entire install, from go to whoa, took less than 15 minutes.
Not being made of money, to reduce the electricity consumption I turn off my Kubuntu home machine after each time I use it. After all, it takes only 15 seconds from turning it on again before it is fully ready for use on the next occasion. The only downside is that there is no time to make myself a coffee.
Exactly, shorter boot times are only important on OSes that have to reboot a lot.
Bragging about getting a Linux boot to under 10 seconds, which might save you 5 minutes in a year, is like bragging you got the top speed of an F1 car 10% higher, which might shave 5 minutes off your race time all season. 
Now, getting a Windows system to boot in 10 seconds would be something worth bragging about. That would save you 15-20 minutes a week.
I would love to do that, but the last two versions, suspend has been totally broken for my laptop. so I appreciate the really fast boot 😉
I do feel Ubuntu is getting better and better. Lucid is, at least for me, the latest wonderful achievement of open source philosophy (with a touch of proprietary drivers and codecs). Also looking forward to Fedora 13 and so on.
Anyway, I’ve been using Lucid since Beta release and had problems with top-left positioning of the buttons but I agree with Mark Shuttleworth’s reasoning that this positioning leaves space on the top-right for other exciting features in the future. After netbook remix this seems the most promising innovation in Ubuntu yet. At least from the desktop user’s perspective.
There are, of course, still some things left to be resolved but the way Ubuntu has been developing looks very promising. I wish Yahoo (thinking of Yahoo messenger here), Adobe (Photoshop) and some other developers would finally realise that there is, like they say, a new man in OS town.
“and had problems with top-left positioning of the buttons but I agree with Mark Shuttleworth’s reasoning that this positioning leaves space on the top-right for other exciting features in the future.”
Crippled argumentation of mr Mark Shuttleworth. Cold logic makes me suggest: “how about placing those buttons on the RIGHT and leaving space for exciting futures on the LEFT side of the bar?”.
You see, there’s something deeply wrong with forcing users to adopt this ridiculous placement of the buttons.
Did Mr M.S. want to make his OS original … ? well, very weird wayt to do it.
It’s just the default in a couple of included themes.. you may be overstating this a bit.
Unfortunately an issue occurred about 10 days ago when I updated my clean Ubuntu 10.04 pre-release partition.
There is a major problem (or set of problems) involving Intel 845 and 855 graphic chipsets which results in a blank screen when you get to the point of getting to the log-on screen.
Though there are no changes today on release day, aparently Cannonical has chosen to disable 3D graphics on these installs until they get the bug worked out.
Links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/26/ubuntu_xserver_memory_leak_…
.. and:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/563277/com…
It looks like the problem is with Intel and their driver though a kernel update is likely.
So it appears that the fears of 50% of laptop users upgrading to a dead screen may not be the case.
Doubly unfortunate:
Although the actual Ubuntu iso was updated from the release candidate (has a different MD5SUM) the live CD still locks up at the same place in Boot as before.
So they did not reduce the functionality of all Intel users and the boot/upgrade/install will still fail for the many, many, many users who are not terribly geeky.
More to the point, my test partition is blissfully unaware of any updates which could make it useful.
Most users will think their system bricked, unaware of the safe video mode buried deeply within the grub menu.
They should have either made Intel graphics boot into safe video mode, or delayed the release.
There is not even an errata sheet on the Ubuntu home page like Fedora uses:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs
Contrast:
https://help.ubuntu.com/
Bad Impression.
Bad politics.
Is there any way to disable the “Me Menu” but keep the nice menu with logout, shutdown, suspend, etc.?
I don’t use any of the social junk and I really hate having my name and a big X permanently stuck to my panel.
Uninstall the package ‘indicator-me’. The whole idea needs a bit more work such as making this more logical but I guess that will come in time.
Edited 2010-04-29 20:15 UTC
There is a bug in the Grub2 install that prevents the option of dual-booting (your other OS will not show up in boot menu). If you have already installed 10.04, they are releasing an update that will take care of this issue. If you haven’t installed, and you are dual-booting, you might want to wait a day. Shortly they are creating a re-spin without this issue.
This public service announcement was brought to you by:
Apple – forcefully opening the doors of innovation!
Really? Works fine for me with Windows 7.
Were you a new install or an upgrade?
Or perhaps they’ve been able to get the re-spins out there faster than they thought.
Either way, glad to see it works for you. I upgraded a couple weeks earlier (so I wouldn’t have to fight the download fest). Also, I am going to purchase a netbook soon and I will install it there.
Go Lucid… sounds like good advice.
I have an Asus 1005PE, and I can tell you Lucid makes a great netbook os. It’s much better than previous Ubuntu versions, in no small part because that atrocious hal daemon is gone. That thing was a polling power-hogging process that kept battery consumption relatively high as compared to other oses both Linux and otherwise. With that out of the way though, I can finally get the full 14 hours of battery life out of it, something that before I could only do with a carefully configured Arch setup.
I installed Kubuntu on my 10″ netbook. Kubuntu doesn’t have any issues with re-loaction of title-bar controls. I set the main menu to “classic mode”, I changed the clock on the menu bar to an analog clock, and I then moved the panel away from the bottom to the left-hand edge of the screen. I set up a quick-launch group for the 8 most-used applications, and Kubuntu provides a quick-access file navigation mode. I set up smb4k to auto-run and re-mount network shares after login, which works well even via a wireless network connection.
I set up a folderview on the main desktop Windows (if you prefer icons directly on the desktop, you can do this, but I think a folderview works better with other desktop widgets you may want to use). You can choose to have the same layout on each virtual desktop, or a different layout for each desktop … this will depend on the way you work which way is better for you.
With the main panel on the left-hand edge, the netbook now has the full screen height to utilise when running applications. This is particularly good when running Firefox, Kmail/Kontact, Okular, Google Chrome, OpenOffice or digikam (for use with digital cameras). I often run a few different applications full-screen on a separate desktop … so that I can flick the mouse to a screen corner and I get a “present windows” to switch applications, or I can scroll the mouse wheel when hovering over the desktop manager icon in the panel to “spin the cube” between applications.
Vertical screen real-estate is at a premium on netbooks. This is a very good way to run applications on a netbook and minimise the impact of its restricted vertical screen real-estate.
Kubuntu Lucid has really improved over previous releases. It is a neck-and-neck decision as to which will be better between Kubuntu Lucid or PCLinuxOS 2010. Perhaps Kubuntu will get the edge because of the larger number of applications available in its repositories.
Edited 2010-04-29 23:58 UTC
The bug which cause the other OS entry to be omitted was not a GRUB2 bug, it was an installer bug which executed grub after blocking the “visibility” of the other partitions/OSes.
The bug was fixed before the release.
I realise that this will go down like a lead balloon around here but….
They can talk up the releases as much as they like but every release I have tried has been broken in some obvious way this one is no exception!
Apparently the latest release has a bug in grub whereby dual booters won’t be able to see their other OS’s without a patch. I mean come on it’s not in the least bit unusual to dual-boot so how the hell do they miss this stuff?
Ubuntu have created some great work over the years but these stupid bugs let them down everytime.
I must agree, not all new Ubuntu release are better than the previous. My all time favorite and most stable release was Ubuntu 6.10. I was all downhill from there, until Ubuntu 8.04.2 (though the X11+WINE painting bug is driving me nuts). I’m busy downloading the new release now, but will first try it in VirtualBox before I wipe my current install. Maybe I should try Kubuntu instead?
kubuntu won’t help any, shares most packages with ubuntu
Yeah, but Kubuntu fixes the worst bug in Ubuntu by replacing GNOME.
Depends on the preferences of the user, I don’t like kde and ubuntu seems to get a bit more attention to detail.
but 64bit flash is still broken (the one for linux on the adobe site doesn’t work properly)
Did it ever? I was using it for a while but it crashed so much I ended up going back to nspluginwrapper. Granted that was on an Arch system which, obviously, isn’t officially supported by Adobe but still…
The bug you refer was fixed prior to the release, it is sad to see people so easily criticizing others people work without even trying and instead repeating what they have read somewhere in a loop of disinformation.
I have also been affected with different problems on past releases, that is why I have been participating more and more in the development stage. This way I was able to identify problems and provide sufficient information to get them fixed prior to the release.
You are correct my initial news source didn’t mention this.
That why not code it yourself(however subtly worded) is a tired old line though.
Edited 2010-05-03 00:26 UTC
On the issue of bootloader grub bug:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IncidentReports/2010-04-29-Late-respin-for-b…
Edited 2010-04-30 07:32 UTC
I installed 10.04 on my Mac Mini, just to give it a spin two years after deserting Linux as my main desktop OS. Sound does not work (at all), and associating with a wireless access point only works once (the second time you need to reboot, rmmod-ing and modprobing the driver does not help). Besides that Ubuntu One is great in theory, if I could actually register my machine.
My perception is unchanged: the problem is still polish, polish, polish. (Death by a thousand cuts, as they used to call it.)
Edited 2010-04-30 10:05 UTC
So, like any midrange or up laptop from dell, hp, or toshiba over the last few years, I have a subwoofer in my laptop. It is extremely difficult to get any output at all out of it in ubuntu. If you do get it working, it just acts as a third speaker (as opposed to windows, where it does a low pass filter and only plays the bass frequencies). Makes it so that the sound quality is abysmal in ubuntu compared to windows.
Also, suspend used to work great, but the last two versions have completely broken it. It can’t be blamed on buggy ACPI either, because this used to work.
Thankfully, it doesn’t crash every time I try to shut down anymore. That went away with 9.10
personally most of my systems actually boot faster than they resume from hibernation (prolly because they have a few more things to save from memory)
so i just shut them down anyway
any additional boot time saved is nice until we reach a 5s boot time from the time i push the power button
usually, bios/etc takes 50% of the time, the OS the other 50%.. yes bios’n friend suck
I tested one of the betas and the last RC on my laptop and had no problems. I am unable to boot the final I just get a black screen. The disk is good I can boot a machine at work with it. Oh well I will keep using what I have for now.
All the hype about THE BEST Ubuntu release yet – rubbish. I downloaded it and try to install it on my Toshiba A10 laptop and it fails! Turns out there is a major bug with Intel integrated graphics chipsets.
There is a work-around to at least get the Live CD going but even after the install there are likely to be the same graphics chipset problems. The fix for these is to totally degrade the graphics performance of the PC. And they call this THE BEST Ubuntu release yet! To think I was going to blow away a perfectly good fuctioning Windows XP install! I’ve got to get over thinking of Linux as a desktop alternative.
Linux has a long long way to go yet to be a serious desktop alternative.
Regards,
Peter
It’s the best for me anyway, depends on your hardware I guess..
Edited 2010-05-02 05:28 UTC
I really don’t understand why everybody is so optimistic about the new look. I like what they’ve done to the logo, but the new default theme, from boot to desktop, is just horrible. It all just looks like a bad quality (snow) Leopard rip-off.
It might not that big of a deal since you can easily change it, but if the main theme isn’t that big of a deal than why bother changing it at all?
At least the previous theme looked cohesive, slick and original.
My first impression is that someone really cared to do something about previous installation scripts and the installed products.
The installation had some glitch concerning missing network dependencies, yet networking seems to be working. Another thing that was odd was that the wallpaper went to its new version while GNOME hadn’t changed. fw-cutter got the firmware for my Broadcom WiFi card just fine, so everything was smoother for me than every upgrade since 7.10.
What seems odd are the new colour choices. The process bar/thermometer/whatever colour just doesn’t seem to fit. Sure, I’ll change it later, but it struck me as an odd choice. Oh, and weren’t the GNOME window gadgets on the left hand side of the Title bar originally?
Everything seemed very responsive. Now, if we could get some warm and fuzzy software choices from the big names, grandma might be happy with Linux this year.
Edited 2010-05-02 03:06 UTC
LDAP: phpldapadmin is 1.1.0.7. DOESN’T work with php 5.3
LDAP: can you start a fresh DIT or you need to have a Pn.D in aerospace engineering?
LDAP: thunderbird segfaults unless you run nscd
GRUB2: doesn’t like virtio hd. Forget about using grub2 on your kvm virtual machines (unless you switch to emulated scsi/ide)
KVM: virt-manager, CANNOT create virtual disk on LVM.
SERVER EDITION: boots with splash image and it doesn’t let you see if your services are starting correctly or no. WHY a splash in a SERVER!? WWHHHYYYYYY!!!???
Yes. I reported them to b.l.n
BTW, I’m running Lucid in 8 servers (virtual machines) and 4 desktops. I’m pretty happy with it, but those bugs not being fixed are starting to worry me.