Martin Notes

I must start by admitting that I only tested UE in VirtualBox and I have seen that booting from a CD makes Ubuntu less stable then fully installed.

That said: UE is not really special. It’s what it promises: Ubuntu with a lot of stuff already installed. The installed stuff ranges from a load of themes to five different development IDEs.

After booting, which was about as fast as Ubuntu booting from CD, UE shows a very techy desktop with a dark theme applied. And, OMG, a spinning mouse cursor. I thought we’d have passed that point by now. Aside from the visual part everything seems to be working just like Ubuntu does. The VirtualBox hardware is nicely recognized and supported.

Since I’m a theme fan I started by switching between themes, well, I switches a theme. At that point the Appearance Manager crashed and I was stuck with a half applied theme. Appearance Manager kept crashing so I had to restart X to make it work again. A really bad start for a review.

After the themes I started browsing through the applications. What I like is that it has some of the post install tasks already done: Gnome DO is already installed, AWN is already there, the CHM viewer, gDesklets and Screenlets (why?) all of them ready to use. And that’s only the Accessories section! There is so much software installed here, it tends to go after the Sony preinstalled Vista: who needs all this?

And that’s the central question in this distro: who needs this? There appears to be no direction in the installed software. Who will use gDesklets and Screenlets together? Why is aMSN and Empathy and Konversation and Kopete and Pidgin installed? Maybe the nedriest of nerds would need all of this to use the ‘best’ for every task, but I think 99% of users will be more scared then happy by UE.

The only useful application I can come up with is to use UE as a test environment for applications. Since nearly every application known to mankind is installed and ready to use, it’s really easy to start VirtualBox and play with the installed app before deciding whether you’d want it on your own machine. But that’s a very limited application for a distro. Especially since Ubuntu offers the .deb based software installation and removal tools which makes experimenting with application really easy.

I’m rather disappointed in Ultimate Edition 2.0. I was expecting Ubuntu, but then done right: something special and daring. UE is not that, it’s a collection of preinstalled software that has no use in the real world.

Ultimate-edition 2.0 has been released. It’s a release build on top of Ubuntu 8.10, but it has been hand tuned. There are three releases: 32, 64 bits and the game release.

Will Williams made a mock-up for Ubuntu Intrepid a long time ago and people generally agreed that this was one of the best out there. Apparently Mr. Williams has found himself some friends (I saw some comments from the Elementary guys) to make the theme for real.

I have the theme installed now and I must say I’m impressed. It’s not a 100% perfect, but it comes really close. Especially the background and the menus are brilliant. After some time working with the controls I switched those over to the Dark Room set, which suites the brown better then the gray that Will used.

There is a new code release of Google Gadgets. I’ve been looking for a .deb file all over, but apparently the interest is gone since the first release. So the only thing left to do is: compile it myself. Luckily Google has already posted most of the dependencies on their how-to-build page, that saves a lot of make time. I’ve described the build for Gnome GTK here:

Download the Google Gadgets source
wget http://google-gadgets-for-linux.googlecode.com/files/google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.3.tar.bz2

Install the dependencies
sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev libmozjs-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libltdl3-dev libxt-dev libxul-dev libgtk2.0-dev librsvg2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
I’ve added the “libxt-dev” which was missed in the Google instructions.

Configure the build
./configure --prefix=/usr
Google advises to add the prefix to avoid library linking problems.

Make the application
make

Install the application
sudo make install

And start it
ggl-gtk

I haven’t seen any major updates to the last release yet. All I can say is that it feels a bit faster.

Since I own a Sony TZ laptop, and it has a wide screen monitor, I’m worried about vertical screen space. I’ve been blogging about that before. Now I found a hack that might help a bit. There is a thing called Global Menu for Gnome.

It kills the menu in the window and puts in it an applet in a Gnome panel. The idea is stolen from Apple, but it’s a good idea I think. It removes the completely useless line in each window. Now all that has to be removed ins the titlebar, then I’ll be even more happy with the interface.

Now the weak thing: I haven’t tried the global menu yet. I don’t want to kill my Ubuntu immediately after installing Intrepid. I want to create a VM with Intrepid and try it out there. It will take some time, but I’ll post the result here.

I’ve been working with a lot of enterprise software during my whole career and it keep surprising me that almost no enterprise tool has any consideration for performance. I understand that the pricing is usually per CPU, which makes performance a less interesting feature for sales. But it goes too far.

How is it possible that you are advised to run 1 Oracle  WebLogic Portal instance on 1 CPU? I know portal is not comparable to PHP, but a factor 1:1000 is a bit to much for my liking. And Oracle is not alone in this: IBM, SAP, all of these are slow and slower. And it’s weird since we (the IT boys and girls) have fixed this a long time ago.

There is a beautiful concept called HTML caching. Yes, I know: that’s not nice, architectural incorrect, not flexible enough. Indeed, heavily personalised pages might not be the primary candidates for full page caching, but most of the websites out there still use a fairly static homepage. Cache that page!

At Componence we’ve (finally) delivered a standard caching solution to put in front of Oracle WebLogic Portal (or BEA Weblogic Portal and the result is shocking. The performance improvement is upwards of 1:20. Give it a try: http://www.wk-vet.fr. Yes, that’s portal, and it’s dynamic.

Dear enterprise architects, please stop being such principle asses and apply the most common fixes to your performance problems.

It’s already old news, but Intrepid Ibex has been release. Get it while it’s hot. It’s worth the download.

Look at my Current install page for an overview of what I install after the default install.

It seems there is a little progress in the support of MS Exchange 2007 in Evolution. The development halted due to license problems of the code in Evolution and libmapi. But now it seems that a brave developer has opened the discussion to update the license of Evolution so that development can continue. I certainly hope so, not only because Componence uses Exchange 2007, but also for the spreading of Linux to the business user.

Update:

Apparently Mr. Srinivasa Ragavan is really doing something to get the Exchange connection working. Keep up the good work!

I only ran Ibex from the Live CD. The suspend seems to have stopped working, when I suspend and resume then I get a working system, but no mouse cursor and a black screen. Killing X works, but it’s not nice. That made me not upgrade.

Very positive is that it’s FAST. Not only Gnome works smoothly, but Firefox is just incredible. I’ve visited sites that I know have a lot of, very slow, javascript and they worked just amazingly fast. The bug that the passwords for multiple wireless networks are lost seems to be fixed.

It looks good, not special, but I knew that. I’m a bit disappointed about the suspend/resume not working. I hope that will be fixed before the release, because I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the fast resume in the beta.

Owwww, we’re almost there! The Ubuntu 8.10 release candidate has been released.