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.

Linux review, Ubuntu, Ultimate edition

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.

Linux, Ubuntu release, Ubuntu, Ultimate edition

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.

GUI, Ubuntu theme, Ubuntu

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.

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu build, Google Gadgets, intrepid ibex

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.

GUI, Ubuntu Gnome global menu, GUI, Ubuntu