Martin Notes

The people from Ubuntu have been working on the release of 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, for a while now. a few days ago they released the Alpha 3, which contains the new 2.6.28 linux kernel with ext4 and some performance updates for the graphical drivers. Apparently ext4 saves a lot of time while booting, I’ve read improvements of 30%, which is impressive.

9.04 should have some nice improvements when it’s release. Gnome 2.26 should be in it, and with that the evolution exchange plugin (finally!). For the KDE people there will be KDE 4.2 which offers some cool visual and performance updates.

Here is the release schedule, that gives you something to look forward to:

November 20th, 2008 – Alpha 1 release
December 18th, 2008 – Alpha 2 release
January 15th, 2009 – Alpha 3 release
February 5th, 2009 – Alpha 4 release
February 26th, 2009 – Alpha 5 release
March 12th, 2009 – Alpha 6 release
March 26th, 2009 – Beta release
April 16th, 2009 – Release Candidate
April 23rd, 2009 – Final release

I’m currently downloading the alpha 3 release of Kubuntu. As soon as it’s installed I’ll post a review.

Ubuntu

I’ve downloaded the Windows 7 build 7000 beta with the intention to install it in VirtualBox 2.1. I wonder if it can match Ubuntu’s Performance, usability and feature set.

First the download itself: it took a long time since Microsoft didn’t expect so many people to download the beta… Is that naive or just plain stupid? But after a full night  downloading the iso is in.

1. Installation

I’ve created a VB machine with the Vista settings, I assume that Windows 7 should run on a machine with at least Vista’s settings: I have created a VM with 16Gb disk, 1Gb memory and 128Mb video memory, 3D enabled. Microsoft promised that Windows 7 would be more resource friendly.

It takes ages before Windows 7 has figured out what hardware the machine contains, but the installation itself runs smoothly. It requires 2 restarts, but that normal with Windows. After about 50 minutes I’m on a working desktop. Aero doesn’t work, that was to be expected. The install takes about 7Gb (!)

Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions also doesn’t work, that’s a bit disappointing. So I ended up manually updating the drivers for the system and the video. Another restart required.

Ubuntu clearly wins here. The Ubuntu installation is easier, more logical and much faster.

2. General performance

It’s slow. I know that will have to do with the VM, but that’s not the only reason. The performance indicators showed that even in the VM my machine should be able to run Windows 7. When I click anything it opens slow, very slow. The Card Deck application took about 50 seconds to open.

I have the feeling that Windows 7, as Vista, depends to much on Aero for the frontend that not being able to run Aero breaks the whole system. Also Windows 7 still starts a lot of services after it has already shown the desktop which causes it to be less responsive in the first minutes. After this is done the system response improves a lot. It’s not as fast as Windows XP in the VM, but it’s much better then Vista.

Memory usage after startup is 300Mb, that’s impressive!

Ubuntu is faster. That’s no surprise.

After playing with the monitor settings I managed to kill the resolution of the monitor, it now displays 800×600. So if you want to play with Windows 7: don’t fool around with the screen resolution!

3. Ease of use and visual niceness

I’m a Gnome and Mac addict, I never liked the Windows and KDE interface approach. The new taskbar which an act like a dock is pretty nice. It takes a lot of screen space though, which is a general problem with the Windows 7 visual design. The icon tray is still there, include the bizarre ‘hide icon when not active’ function.

Explorer (the file manager, not the browser) is very much the same as in Vista. The only difference I could find was that the ‘open folder’ triangles fade out when the pane is inactive. What’s strange is that the Folder Settings dialog is still the same as in windows XP, that dialog is 10 years old…

If I look at the default installation only, so no personalisation then Windows 7 is doing quite good. The Ubuntu default config with the awful orange/brown colors and the Gnome default layout is horrible. Windows 7 looks more clean and the start menu is fast and easy to use.

While configuring Windows 7 more to my liking I was reminded of why I prefer Ubuntu: Windows can’t be configured. You can can choose a predefined setup that matches your needs best, but you can’t tweak it completely. Windows is and stays what it is.

When you play around with Ubuntu it enables you to make it exactly as you want it. This takes time and effort, so not everybody will do that. If you stay with the default config I’d say Windows 7 is actually better then Ubuntu, but if you’re ready to think and do some tweaking Ubuntu is so much better than Windows 7.

On the ease of use I would say Ubuntu and Windows 7 are equal. Ubuntu is more configurable, but most people won’t use that, Windows is familiar and that’s working ok. On the visual level I like Ubuntu better (especially with the Shiki Colors scheme!), but that’s mainly taste. Windows 7 looks good, so I’d call this a draw.

4. Preinstalled features

There is a huge difference in the approach that Windows 7 and Ubuntu take here. Windows 7 is an operating system, with everything that an OS needs: kernel, GUI, utilities, even some end user applications like Notepad and Paint.It’s not a fully operation system after installation; you need to install your productivity tools yourself: mail, word processor, spreadsheet, etc. This makes sense: not everybody wants to use what your supplier offers you.

Ubuntu installs a lot more end user applications, it actually comes fully loaded. After installation you can start working. This is easier, but it also forces you to use the preinstalled tools or to deinstall them and install your own preferences.

When it comes to the preinstalled features Ubuntu is a clear winner. Windows delivers near to nothing when it comes to end user applications.

What Windows does deliver a complete stack of OS features. In that section it is a good competitor of Ubuntu. Please mind that I’m looking at this from the standpoint of the end user, and not a system administrator. Windows 7 even includes a decent command line tool, which supports some more Unix oriented commands like ‘ls’ and ‘cat’. A peculiar decision of Microsoft.

Windows 7 has a complete and understandable set of tools to manage the system. Ubuntu tends to get a bit hard to understand for newbies at some points, although this is improving fast.

Windows 7 has sufficient features to call it a good OS, but Ubuntu delivers a much more complete set of features. Ubuntu is the winner here.

Conclusion

Windows 7 is far better then Vista. It’s faster, looks a little better and takes yet another small step towards the future. But. I’ve downloaded 2.44Gb to be able to install a system that contains only an OS. Nothing more, just a kernel, a GUI and some utilities. It takes 7Gb on your harddisk after installation and it can’t run 3D graphics in a slower machine.

I have mixed feelings here. On the one side Windows 7 is really going somewhere, it’s good. But on the other side Ubuntu is so much better when you tweak it a bit. When Canonical would invest some more time in delivering a more tasty off the shelf install then it would easily defeat windows. But they don’t.

There is no winner in this competition. Windows 7 will be the next most used OS, there is no question about that. Ubuntu is trying to compete, but it will never be able to. In the end Ubuntu is a better OS, which a better GUI, but it should show that much better then it does now.

Ubuntu review, windows7

One of the features I’ve always liked in the Mac is that it hides the mouse pointer when you use the keyboard. That makes it possible to type or read without having the mouse pointer in the way. So I went looking for a solution for Ubuntu. After some googling I found “unclutter”.

Unclutter hides the mouse pointer when you haven’t used the mouse for 5 seconds. Although this is different from the Mac approach, it actually works fine for me. When the pointer is hidden you can type and read and when you move you mouse then the pointer is shown again.

According to the man pages it should be possible to let unclutter hide the pointer when you press (or release) a key, but I couldn’t get that to work.

Installation is easy, it’s in the Ubuntu repos:

sudo apt-get install unclutter

And start it:

unclutter & disown

If you want to start unclutter when you login you can add it to your session:

Open Sessions, click “Add”, type some name (“Unclutter”), command (“unclutter”) and comment (“Hide mouse pointer”) and that’s it.

GUI, Ubuntu mousecursor, unclutter

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:

For now I’ll have to wait until this issue is fixed.

Linux, Ubuntu Exchange, Linux, OpenChange, Ubuntu

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.

iPhone, Linux, Opinion, Personal, Ubuntu bluetooth, iPhone, Linux, Ubuntu

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:

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.

Linux, Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice, Ubuntu

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.

Linux, Opinion, Ubuntu, Web Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualBox

I’ve installed GnoMenu 1.6. It is a Vista style menu for the Gnome desktop. You can just download the deb files (gnomenu_1.6-2_all.deb) and install it. After installing I had to run:

/usr/lib/gnomenu/DesktopIntegration.py

To get it to show up in the Gnome panel “Add to Panel…” dialog.

I must say that from reading about the GnoMenu, and seeing the themes on Gnome-Look, I was quite looking forward to the little panel applet. But after installing it I was disappointed.

First of all the GnoMenu catches your Windows key to open up.  I always hated that feature in Windows and I don’t want it in my Ubuntu. Especially since I’m using the Windows key as my main shortcut key: Windows 1-4 are my desktops, Windows-T is a terminal, Windows-E is Nautilus (yes, that’s a Windows shortcut).

Second, the thing just feel clunky. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it doesn’t feel smooth or elegant. I want my main menu to give me the feeling that I will find the application I’m looking for. GnoMenu gave me the feeling that it might take a while. Not only from the feel, but also because it’s just slow. When you start typing in the search field it takes ages before it shows you the application that you’re looking for.

I must admit that’s where I stopped testing. The GnoMenu is just not ready yet. It’s a nice idea, and the Gnome main menu is ready for an update for sure, but this is not the one.

I’ll just stick to Gnome-Do.

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu Gnome, GnoMenu, Ubuntu

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