Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Alpha 6-Nice Features

[emorrp1]

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/open-ba ... -too-short has tons of comments on the development cycle, and how that affects "quality". Basically every package we want to change from Ubuntu base has to have a maintainer who's going to keep abreast of any developments upstream.

[exploder]

emorrp1, thanks for the link! There are a lot of differences of opinion and gives me more things to think about.

[midas]

Mmm...I have been ventilating my opinion about this subject a couple of times. If one want to bring it down to a central point, it would mean only one quality standard or performance benchmark:

I want a working system from the day of install through the whole using period. No matter what. And I choose the distribution that will serve that only goal. The looks and bells and whistles comes second. For me that means PCLOS or Mint when they will find a way to keep out of reach of all the Ubuntu-bugs. I hope so because I have a soft spot in my heart for Mint. The distro that finally made me deleting MS from my system...

On behalve of the whole Mint-team...I have trust in you and will not leave your wonderful distribution within a few weeks or even months. But at the end I will choose the distro that simply works without bugs and glitches on my system. No matter what.

[deleted]

With Debian, who really cares about bugs in a particular release? Well, that's a loaded question, but seriously all you have to do is read the release notes to see what's broken. That really on affects new installations. If there are too many bugs for the new release, install the old one.

Now the Debian part... This is why I chose a Debian based distro. It's a rolling release. That means once it's on your box, then to upgrade to the latest, it's apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Ubuntu throws a curve ball because they are actually mixed repositories... (say jaunty contains Debian SID and Debian Testing packages + Ubuntu fixes), but for the most part, Ubuntu honors the rolling releases. Ubuntu does name their releases (jaunty, karmic, ...) so you do have to reflect that in /etc/apt/sources.list, but that's documented on Ubuntu's site.

The thing is, that after you install (and are happy) once, you can update your installation as needed and when you feel comfortable with the next update.

[midas]

According to what I have been reading at the dutch Ubuntu-site Karmic seems to get a bit stable again? After, again, a lot of updates. Perhaps someone can confirm it as a fact?

[exploder]

Yes, things are starting to settle down again. I have seen work done to address the issues with Intel graphics, now it is mostly just a lot of little bugs to fix. With some luck maybe the release candidate will run pretty decent.

[exploder]

I checked out yesterday's daily build and things are looking much better that they were. I noticed that today there is another kernel upgrade and some xserver packages available. Things have settled down in the Karmic development forum and that is a good sign. I am going to see how todays daily build runs, it really looks like they took the Intel issue seriously and have taken steps to ensure that Intel users will not be disappointed.

My Wife says that I take this stuff too seriously, I told her that someone has to. I am interested to see if power management is working in todays daily build. I noticed a small bug in gdm but I am figuring it will be fixed and there is a bug report out for it. I noticed there were some python updates today too, this effects us so I am hoping for the best.

[midas]

I am glad you take it all seriously exploder...let's hope Karmic will be a good release and Mint Helena even much better

[exploder]

Well, today's daily build will not be getting installed... I get a black screen on boot and it kicks me out of the desktop before it finishes loading. I had to use startx to get as far as I did. Karmic might still need a little bit of work. Oh well, there is always tomorrow.

[waldo]

I've been doing the daily updates to the original beta build, and it all seems to run fine. Yesterday there appeared to be an update to the nVidia driver, along with the third kernel update.

Anyone out there know anything about this new GRUB thingy? Every kernel update keeps adding lines to the grub menu, and I cannot find the file that needs to be edited to trim it down. It is no longer /boot/grub/menu.lst.

[emorrp1]

waldo, see http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 23&start=0 for info on grub2

[waldo]

waldo, see http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 23&start=0 for info on grub2

Thanks! It looks complicated. Need to get another cup of coffee.

[skilo47]

i find linux mint 7 is much nicer than ubuntu .

for some reason ubuntu 9.04 crashed my acer aspire one a 150 alot. i believe due to it using the ath5k driver for wirelss by default . (that driver sucks)

im guessing linux mint 7 uses madwifi by default as i have had no problems and wireless is much faster on linux mint 7 than ubuntu 9.04.

does anyone know what wireless driver linux mint 7 uses by default ?

[ibm450]

just installed 9.10 and after so many updates, i must say its not bad

found it to be much more snappier the lm7 or should i say ubuntu 9.04

ill definitely install the new lm8 when its out. ive also noted that 9.10 used much less mem then 9.04 why is that

Also, i must admit that after using LM full time for about close onto 6 mths, the theme is much better then the default ubuntu theme and the menu layout is more fluent to find / search for your apps.

+1 to the LM layout + theme

So, LM8 is out when? Nov / dec?

[exploder]

It must just be my hardware that is having the problem with 9.10. The last couple of days I can't get a daily build to get to the desktop, ever since the -13 kernel update. I could run earlier builds but kept loosing desktop effects and start up would be messed up every few boots. I keep trying daily builds every day to see if 9.10 will boot. Maybe today....

[ibm450]

ok, mounting new external drives are very slow to mount up on 9.10??? frustrating at this point of time.

LM7 boots up SO much faster then 9.10, both auto login

love the way 9.10 shuts down, so FAST !!!

love the way 9.10 uses so much lesser mem then 9.04

[lexon]

Last night I downloaded and burned the ISO CD. This morning ran the Live CD just fine. Installed the OS next. Ejected the CD and the PC rebooted. Real nice. I used a spare 80gb drive that has moonOS on it and divided the drive for each OS. Install and operation was fine.

Except, when I powered down the PC, later powered up, I can select moonOS just fine. I cannot select Ubuntu 9.1. What I get is:
error: invalid environment block
failed to boot default entries
Press any key to continue

The PC is what I am using to run Mint. CPU, 3g, 2gb ram.

Anyway, seems to be nice but I will wait for the next upgrade of Mint. I would rather support Mint anyway.

lex

[Katzedecimal]

I've been playing with Karmic beta main on my laptop, and Karmic Netbook Remix beta on my Acer Aspire One. They were very unstable when I first installed, with instant messenger clients (both Empathy and Pidgin) crashing, and odd hangs at bootup. Then I had one major crash on the UNR that necessitated a complete reinstallation, as it wasn't recoverable, wouldn't boot into any kernel However, another update, including kernel 2.6.30-13 and things have smoothed out considerably. Aaaaaand the intel graphics on the AAO's UNR have smoothed out rather a lot, although my AAO doesn't have the 985 chipset that's the worst victim. Wifi has been more consistant and has shown better detection.

I'm not impressed by Empathy. I've found it lacks many of Pidgin's features, such as, oh I dunno, popping up a window when someone IMs me, as opposed to just blinking their icon on the buddy list. If it weren't for the Gnome notifications, I'd never have realised that I'd been IM'd. Empathy also doesn't support mail notifications; Pidgin offers mail notifications for AIM, Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, etc. I've read that Empathy supports cam for MSN but I couldn't get that to work, nor does it work for Yahoo's camming. What it does work for is XMPP camming, buuuuuut so do the newest releases of Pidgin. I gave Empathy a decent workout but eventually went back to Pidgin as my default messenger, it's simply more mature.

Still, camming on the AAO does work on UNR now, as does the Wifi light, microphone and sound. Boot-up, though not 10 seconds on my SSD (I have an AAO 110L), is a satisfactory (to me) 25 seconds. Well, it's a CONSIDERABLE improvement over previous attempts to get UNR to run on the AAO 110L. And installation takes up 2.3 GB of the 8 GB SSD. Performance is surprisingly quick, considering it uses the Gnome environment, and resource usage is much improved; previous attempts to put UNR on the 110L were painfully slow and sucked up memory and CPU like a sponge. Battery management still sucks though, 2h20m out of a 3h battery. As a friend is considering UNR for her AAO 150XP, I'm giving it a much more thorough test-drive, hence all the details.

I did try installing the main Karmic (sans UNR tweaks) onto the AAO and was pleased to see that it displayed the AAO's 1048 x 600 resolution correctly. That bodes well for Mint users, as inability to display is one of the reasons why Mint is not on my AAO (it typically shows 1048 x 760, i think it is, and thus buries buttons, making it extremely difficult to use)

The main Karmic beta on my laptop (a 5 year old Dell Latitude with 512 mb of RAM) is unremarkable. Sound works, boot-up is fine, video works, wifi works, memory management is good. Stability is improved after the last set of updates, messengers no longer crashing. There's nothing particularly impressive about it, but I'm not throwing the machine across the room, either

[vrkalak]

I, too, have been upgrading the Daily Builds for Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha-6, then Beta . . . except for an updating glitch back on 10/11 everything seems to be going along well.

I like what the Ubuntu Devs have done, so far. Everything works for me. Looks nice, a little faster. Sweet!!

All these daily builds and the Final Release of Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 in a couple weeks . . . just makes me want the new LinuxMint-8 Helena, even more.

[Katzedecimal]

10/11 was when I had the major killing glitch as well. Glad to hear it wasn't just me, sorta....