Visit this article for an overview about the new development in commercial operating systems. The article focuses on Windows, but the same applies to Mac OS X. I like the fact that it makes Linux a principle choice, not only a cheap one.
Ubuntu 9.04 has been released yesterday and of course I installed it immediately. I’ve been running the 9.04 release since the alphas, but the Ubuntu tradition is that the release is much better then the pre-releases.
Installation
For the installation I decided to use a separate boot partition which should make it more easy to have multiple systems on my laptop. I’ve tried this two times, but sadly this resulted in a kernel panic telling me something about a failed synchronization. So I skipped the boot partition setup and installed the boot files on the system partition. That worked just fine.
The installation itself is smooth and easy to understand. The most improved part is the timezone selection, that works fine now opposed to the crappy version in 8.10.
Updates
After installation I did my usual updates:
All of those worked fine, for some of them I had to update the software sources, but that was no problem.
Then I went into my usual tweaking: themes. I’m now running the Dust theme which is delivered with Ubuntu these days. It’s a nice quiet theme that requires little screenspace.
NTP
After the visual stuff had been taken care of I ended up with a problem I always had with Ubuntu: installing the NTP time service. Somehow I never can get it to work from the Time and Date admin panel. It always crashes for a while and after a couple of tries it works. A strange bug that has been around for a while now.
Up and running
Now the system is working and all my stuff is installed again (1.5 hours after starting the install), I’m playing with it. It’s fast, the ext4 filesystem seems to make the system more responsive. Starting OpenOffice’s word processor takes a while the first time, but it’s lightning fast the second. Everything in the system feels snappy and robust.
On the functional level nothing really changed from 8.10. The system is nearly the same as 8.10. Of course OpenOffice has been updated to 3.0, but I had that version running on 8.10 for ages already. Brasero has been added, nice, but I don’t burn CDs anymore. When I look at the work I do with my laptop the 9.04 is exactly the same as 8.10.
The new boot splash and the notifications are nice, but they are not a major upgrade. They add to the overall robust feel of the system, however.
Evolution and Exchange 2007
My personal frustration, using Evolution with Exchange 2007, still hasn’t been solved. You can install the evolution-mape package from synaptic now, but it doesn’t work for me. The configuration is sloppy and difficult to understand and from what I’ve read it still doesn’t provide all functionality. That means that I’m still required to run Windows XP in VirtualBox. Too bad.
Conclusion
I knew that 9.04 was not going to be a major step forward. Ubuntu has always taken a evolutionary approach to their development. The system is faster and more stable then 8.10, but it’s not a major step. I must admit that I expect a bigger improvement from being able to use Chrome on Linux then from upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10.
So, what’s new? Nothing much really. Stuff has been changed under the hood, but the end user will not really notice that. It’s still a stable and modern system, but I think some real inovation would really help to make Ubuntu more widely used.
You can register as a linux user, and/or you can register your machine(s).
There have been a number of posts about Gnome Do 0.8 already, but I’ve been late with installing… I must say: it’s brilliant! They’ve combined the normal Do GUI with a dock and that works just great.
The dock works as a dock should: it’s at the bottom of your screen and it shown applications that you can open, or have open. The settings for the dock can be changed by right cliking on the most left icon (summon Gnome Do). There you can change settings like auto hide and whether you want a Mac like zoom in the dock. Adding applications is easy: just drag an icon from the Gnome menu to the dock.
The good thing is that Gnome Do hasn’t lost it’s command line. When you press the keyboard shortcut (Super-Space) or select the “Summon Gnome Do” icon the dock changes into a typing area as you know it from Gnome Do.
To install just update your Software Sources with the following:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main
If you have Gnome Do already installed then you’ll get an update notification pretty soon. If you hot not then you should do the following:
sudo apt-get install gnome-do
To enable the dock you have to select the Docky theme in the appearance preferences.
If you are never satisfied with the amount of settings they are offered: You can find Gnome-Do in the Gnome Configuration Editor at the following path:
/apps/gnome-do/preferences
In the Docky folder you can edit some settings like the IconSize, the monitor where it’s shown and the SummonTime.
I’ve installed the Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope alpha 3 on my normal laptop, I didn’t try anything like VirtualBox since I wanted to see how it performs compared to my normal Intrepid install. So I downloaded the iso, burned the CD, shrank my 8.10 system partition and installed 9.04-3.
Installation
The partition shrinking and installation ran as smooth as possible: No reboots required until the install is complete and no useless questions. Resizing the partition took a while, but after that the installer finished within 15 minutes. I was rather surprised that I had so little problems since it’s an alpha release, maybe that’s because the installer is not under development yet.
First impression
Booting 9.04 is fast. I’ve used the new ext4 filesystem and that’s worth it: My full startup from power on until password entry is about 40 seconds, from there until the KDE desktop is working is about 20 seconds. For comparison: my current 8.10 Gnome takes 60 seconds until password entry and then 40 seconds until a working Gnome desktop. That’s a good start for the rabbit.
The KDE 4.2 is now a release candidate, but I think it still requies quite some work. Although I must admit that my knowledge of KDE is limited, maybe some of the stuff I found is normal in KDE.
First of all my laptop screen is 1366 pixels wide and that’s too much for KDM. The screen where it requests the password leaves a space on the left and right of the monitor where is shows garbage, the middle 1024 (I guess) pixels are rendered correctly. I’ve seen this problem before: KDE 4 doesn’t like widescreen resolutions.
Visuals
After logging in it uses the full width of the screen and I was confronted with the beautiful KDE4 plasma desktop. A small glitch: the KDE panel was too small for the screen, but that was easily fixed. The screenshot shows the desktop after I played around with it for a while. I really like it, the plasmoids work smoothly and integrate with the desktop instead of, like screenlets and Google gadgets, which are windows. The design can be easily adapted to your wishes, but the default design is already very good.
The panel takes a bit getting used to when you get here from Gnome. It behaves like a crossing between the Windows taskbar and a Gnome panel. It has a Vista start menu like feature in the lower left corner, the windows list in the middle and the notification tray and clock on the right. When you right click the panel you can configure the height and width, and some other settings. Here also: everything looks nice and smooth.
Then I opened my first window. How can they deliver such a beautiful desktop with such a horrible windows and widget (or style in KDE speak) manager? The windows don’t fit in the slick and smooth plasma desktop at all. They stand out like somebody drew a stick figure on the Nachtwacht. I tried other styles and window decorators, but they never fit within the plasma desktop.
So I started looking for a style that did fit in, kde-looks should provide a solution there, shouldn’t it? Indeed there are some quite good looking styles and decorators there. So I downloaded , but how to get this into KDE? There is no “Get” or “Import” button with the styles and windows. Which is strange since there is one for colors, plasma styles, etc. Google helped: you need to build them! I won’t bother you with the trouble I had getting the QtCurve style to build, but it takes some skill and time. The result was disappointing. It looks like the KDE 4 desktop still needs to update their style and windows rendering since the current one limits designers way too much. Even Gnome offer more (!)
Functional
The desktop feels good, everything responds well and most of the buttons are in logical places. The working and categorization of the KDE menu takes some getting used to, but I guess that’s just time. One thing that does annoy me is that there a so many ways of configuring stuff and there are so many configurations that it hard to find what you need. For example: Konqueror downloads to the Documents folder by default. I don’t like that, I prefer a separate Downloads folder. So I set of to change that. There are a lot of configuration entries in the Konqueror menu, and each display a load of options, but mine wasn’t there.
There more in that direction: how do I switch off the tap-click of my touchpad? I really had to search to switch of the system sounds, and when I found them I had to switch them off for each action one by one. Why does KWallet ask me for my password each time I login? These are not essential things, but they shouldn’t be present in an OS in 2009.
Kubuntu comes with OpenOffice 3 comes pre-installed and works as expected, so do the address book and the organizer. Gimp is not there since it’s very Gnome. Amarok showed some problems, or: it’s not there. That’s an alpha bug, I guess. The pre-installed applications offer sufficient functionality to start working without immediately starting Adept. When you need to install anything, Adept helps you and finishes the installation nicely: I installed Skype and that didn’t give any problems.
What I found surprising is that I couldn’t find Firefox in Adept. Actually I expected it to be pre-installed, but when it wasn’t I expected it to be easily installable. I hope this is an alpha bug because Konqueror is nice, but I can’t live without FIrefox.
Overall the KDE 4.2 and the underlying Kubuntu is working nicely. There are very little bugs and nearly everything runs smooth and with problems. Of course there are things that require some attention: changing the icon set doesn’t work and scrolling is sometimes a bit jumpy. Although these don’t break the usability of the system. It’s stable, fast and modern.
Conclusion
Aside from the usual alpha problems the Kubuntu 9.04 alpha 3 is pretty good. I might even become a KDE fan when they fix the visual problems with the styles and windows. The best feature so far is the speed of the system, it boots faster and feels much more responsive then 8.10. I’m looking forward to the release.
Maybe the next challenge for the free days: http://kernel.org/. The 2.6.28 linux kernel has been released. Improvements include: GPU memory manager and ext4 support
I have a bit of an obsession with getting Ubuntu to work with MS Exchange 2007. On the website of Johnny Jacob I read that they have started to publish source releases of the plugin. So I downloaded the source of the 0.25.3 release and started fixing dependencies.
First of all you have to fix the pkg-config path setting. I find this weird, since I have to set it to the default setting, ah well. Do this:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
Then I had to replace some version numbers in the config. This sounds strange, but Johnny said it would work. Although I made a broad interpretation of his comment.
replace 2.25.2 with 2.24.2 in configure.in replace 2.25.2 with 2.24.2 in configure
Of course there is a list of dependencies to fulfill:
sudo apt-get install intltool libmapi-dev evolution-data-server-dev evolution-dev libtalloc-dev libdcerpc-dev libsamba-hostconfig-dev libldb-dev libebackend1.2-dev libecal1.2-dev libedata-cal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev
Sadly that’s where things went wrong. The libldb-dev depends on libldb0, but to install libldb0 I need to remove libldb-samba4-0, libmapi-dev and libmapi0, which broke the dependencies:
The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libldb-dev: Depends: libldb0 (= 0.92~git20080616-1) E: Broken packagesFor now I’ll have to wait until this issue is fixed.
The iPhone contains a nice 3G radio and a bluetooth radio, so I thought I’d let my Ubuntu laptop connect to the Internet through the iPhone’s 3G. A little research showed that it is quite straight forward to connect Ubuntu to a 3G service there days (since 8.10), so I didn’t expect a lot of problems.
To my surprise the setup failed at the very first step. I checked the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities by finding the bluetooth address:
hcitool scan
And looking up the capabilities:
sdptool browse <address> | grep Networking
To my surprise the iPhone doesn’t support a dailup connection through bluetooth. Isn’t it rather strange that Apple sells us a phone that doesn’t allow us to share it’s network with the rest of the world? I would assume the TelCos wouldn’t mind, actually I’m surprised they even accepted it.
Apple has been down this road before, the whole Mac OS 9 and earlier was closed to the outside world. You’d have to buy Apple stuff to make it work. Mac OS X improved that a lot, and the hardware support also improved: USB, standard VGA. It’s strange to see that Apple is going back to the more closed approach now. The iPod was still a bit open; you can upload songs from Linux, but the iPhone can’t even be used without iTunes.
Watch it Apple, you won’t be able to hold this so much longer. There will be competition at some point, and then people will start to make different choices. So far you’ve been the best in what you’re doing, but you’re not the only one.
I hope Apple will start seeing that competition is not bad, but that they should learn from them.
I’ve been having problems with the automatic updates of OpenOffice 3.0. I’ve been using this PPA:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main
And automated update gives me the option to do a partial update, which doesn’t work either. Irritating! After some googling I found the following:
The fix is to run system / administration / synaptic and do a mark all upgrades and apply. That’ll get you back up and running without the partial upgrade horking everything.That fixed the problem! Update works and OpenOffice works. What I couldn’t find out is whether OO actually updated. That’s not the important part, since it worked fine and it still does.
VirtualBox 2.1 has been released. Apparently it is a major update from the 2.0.6 release. Check this installation guide to update or install.
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