Ubuntu 11.4 going to release today keep your finger cross

My meagre contribution to the natter on Natty.

Live CD 'experience' was miserable, one could say shocking. No sound, some software center crashes and I couldn't get 3D to work.
I would definitely be on the wrong highway installing this.
My current setup is as follows:-

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 .............. main distro
Ubuntu Maverick .................. secondary distro
Scientific Linux SL6 .............. also secondary distro
(and CentOS 5.6 on old laptop)

I am very happy with all the above, they are all very, very stable.

When Lucid goes into retirement my main distro will probably be Scientific Linux SL6 with
Linux Mint Debian (LMDE) the secondary one.
I was very impressed with the LMDE Live CD - very polished compared to the c....y Nutty (sic) Live CD - and intend to install it on my current Maverick partitions.

Woe behold those who are installing Nutty (sic) to have fun, let alone work productively.

 

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal review - A great surprise

Here's what I think ...

Make it or break it. Here's a long review of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narhwal with the new Unity desktop, covering topics like live session, installation, post-install usage, Wireless, Samba, new look and feel, theme, menu integration, ribbon bar, gestures, desktop effects, Ubuntu classic, proprietary codecs and updates, additional drivers, multimedia - Flash and MP3 playback, changes to Ubuntu Software Center, recommended applications, annoyances, stability, system resources, suspend & resume, and more. Half a year ago, I really did not like Unity, so this shall be interesting? Is Natty any good? Can it start the Linux desktop revolution? Is this the sum of all fail [sic]? Take a look, please.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-natty-narwhal.html


Regards,
Mrk

 

Nice comprehensive review. Thank you very much.
Now that you have tested it on hdd, I feel a little more optimistic trying again although I am not quite Fiat 500 - more like Fiat Topolino.

 

Not a bad review, Mrk. Well presented and fair in its analysis. Nicely done.

I see you included a link to webupd8's Natty tweaking article. I just discovered it not more than an hour ago. It has a lot of useful information for those who wish to change this or that about Natty's default layout and behavior.

Again, well done.

Later...

Bob

 

I'm very surprised... I think Unity has great potential. It just isn't ready yet and when the remaining 20% is addressed, it could reshape the Linux desktop.

 

I'm finding it to be very graphically unstable. In Virtualbox it often doesn't repaint the screen properly and the windows now have no window frames. I have no idea of how to fix that so I am going to have to delete and recreate the VM. 10.10 is still working flawlessly for me. I won't be updating that VM any time soon.

Unity isn't all that bad except I find that if you don't already know what you are looking for it is harder to find. Menus always have all of the options but search only works when you know what you are searching for.

 

Really not bothered by unity at all. I don't care for a desktop that needs composite enabled just to run.
The classic mode however, is good old gnome 2 and runs like a dream. Suspend, hibernate, printer, scanner, great fonts, fast, stable (regardless of what the haters say) etc. It's all the usual buntu goodness.
Gnome 2 isn't quite dead yet.

 

Clean installed to this, because my Maverick installation was getting buggy.

 

Good point. If you didn't know, for example, to look for "synaptic", you'd probably never find it....

 

There's unity 2d in the repo for those of us with old cards. It's not bad. I don't like unity but the 2d performs well.

 

Really like the new Unity, it's better than ever. Graphics looks cooler, and auto-hide saves space. The new start icon is great.

I can hide Applications, Files and Folders, and Mounted Drives as well. Only Trash remains permanent.

 

Like Rush, Tom Sawyer says: changes aren't permanent!
Mrk

 

I recreated my VM and am getting used to the Unity. I still have my 10.10 VM and really don't find myself hating either one, except the 11.04 seems to have a bug. Something makes it change to the default theme on boot, which looks terrible. The only working fix I have found to type "gnome-settings-daemon && killall nautilus" into the terminal after each boot. It looks like many are having this issue according to the posts at the Ubuntu forums but I haven't seen a permanent working fix. I saw suggestions to put this in startup but it doesn't seem to work that way.

 

I'm just trying out 11.04 via a live USB. Going okay so far. Most likely, I'm going to replace Mint 11 with Ubuntu 11.04.

 

Did it. Took some time getting it updated.

My first impression about Unity is that it's cute and just a bit weird. I like it.

I also did the restricted codecs, etc and there's this instead of Oracle's JRE:
IcedTea-Web Plugin (using IcedTea-Web 1.1.1 (1.1.1-0ubuntu1~11.04.1))

I guess it may do for surfing, but LibreOffice Calc macros need the JRE and so I may have to get that as well.

 

Just comparing Ubuntu 11.04 and Mint 11 in terms of ease of use, I'd say that Mint 11 appeared easier for newbies but 11.04 (in Unity mode) is full of features that are delightful to discover.

 

Get the jre-7 version. It's now got the binary and everything else in a folder ( just extract the tar.gz to /opt). http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-se-jre-7-download-432155.html
Also get rid of icedtea and openjdk - quite a number of things that don't work with icedtea.
Unity is not for me right now, but I do like Kubuntu 11.04 which I have been testing in Vbox for a while now.

 

Thanks, Ocky!

Actually, I don't visit sites that have Java requirements much these days. My interest in the JRE part was mainly because Calc macros, even the simple ones I use, seem to require it.

 

As mentioned before I am trying Kubuntu 64 bit 11.04 in Vbox to see if Kubuntu measures up as a possible replacement for Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 which is still my main 'working' distro.

Now I have just tried Oracle's jre-7 and have some problems. I installed to /opt and made a soft link: ln -s /opt/java/jre1.7.0/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so

Opera picks up on this and there is no problem - java works, applets run.
However Firefox 6 doesn't recognise the plugin. If I place the libnpjp2.so file in ~/.mozilla/plugins (from the /opt.. location) Firefox recognises the plugin in aboutlugins but any attempt to load a java applet crashes the browser.
If someone has managed to get jre-7 to work with Firefox 6 please help me out here.

Secondly Libre Office does not recognise/find the runtime, but this appears to be a known issue.

 

I don't think this will help but ...
http://nabble.documentfoundation.or...ine-no-need-for-Oracle-account-td3301190.html
and
http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/3-4-3-released-Stable-and-functionality-combined-td3298132.html

 

vasa1,

Thanks anyway. As it works well with Opera I am not too grumpy. Best is probably to use the jre-6 version - I will try that next.

Have tried with 6u27 version. Now both Opera and Libre Office are fine - but Firefox 6.01 simply doesn't work. I think only up
to FF 5 is supported ?

http://www.imagebam.com/image/715b48147853741