Linux Distributions

So I got the new Ubuntu to install. I downloaded another package and this one worked. I went with the recommended 32 bit version. It COULD well be that the reason the 32 bit is recommended is that the 64 bit simply doesn't work.

It was a LONG install, well over an hour. That seemed a bit odd, but everything went smoothly. Performance is sub-par in general. Boot time from the boot menu is a little over 2 minutes. Mint boots in about 45 seconds and Windows 7 in about 20 seconds. This machine is an I7 960 clocked to 3.7 - I may drop it to stock and see if Ubuntu performs better, native is 3.2 on this CPU.

First thing I did was look at the display properties to configure the duel display setup. It easily detected both monitors and allowed me to extend my desktop to both with different resolutions and aspect ratios for each. I noticed that it was using a default driver and had my Nvidia GTX-460 tagged as "unknown." Now Unity handled multiple displays with transparencies fully intact without the Nvidia driver, which is pretty impressive.

So I went to the Nvidia site and downloaded the only Linux driver they bothered to supply. Went to the driver manage and tried to activate - driver failed. Hmm, this is obviously the same driver that works with Mint, given that it's the ONLY driver offered by Nvidia for Linux, on this card. Oh well, other than speed I'm not sure it does much.

Unity is a nice looking interface. I think it beats traditional Gnome. But it isn't in the same league as Aero-Glass, not that anything is. The designers opted for two docking bars, and did so because Unity lacks the Aero features of stacking, open many programs and the overly-large icons eat up the main dock. So they added a top dock (movable) to show tasks like mail and search. It shows the lack of elegance in the GUI that this is needed. Also missing is the peek feature of Aero. Hold your mouse over a dock icon in Aero and a preview of the program is displayed, put the mouse over the preview and the window is displayed. This is the type of interface functionality that makes Aero so much better than anything else on the market, Unity doesn't live up to this. Another irritation with the interface is the inclusion of a really nice workspace manager - that does nothing. Click on it and it shows all four workspaces in a grid. Cool, I'll drag this window to that workspace and... Wait, they won't drag... Shit, it just previews, I can't actually manage my workspaces with it.. WTF?

This is not the fault of Ubuntu, but Thunderbird is still crap and can't communicate with an encrypted Exchange 2010 server. So no email with Ubuntu - same with Mint. Good thing the OWA has gotten pretty good over the years.

The Citrix receiver worked flawlessly, as it does in Mint.

Over all, Ubuntu is quit sluggish, everything lags and tasks take far longer than they should on a relatively powerful machine. Some of this may be due to graphics drivers, but most of it isn't. 11.10 just isn't quick. Mint and Windows 7 are vastly more responsive on the same hardware. This leaves me to view Ubuntu 11.10 as "merely okay." Mint runs much better as a Linux distro, and Windows 7 still is light years ahead of both in interface and over all functionality.
 
That's interesting. When I tested Ubuntu the lag time was only slightly more then Mint with certain packages (applications to you Windows types) and the boot time was about the same as Mint and Win7, maybe just a tad faster. I clicked on the "additional driver" icon in the top bar after loading and selected 'activate driver', worked like a charm. As for the initial installation, total time, around half an hour maybe a little longer. As for the workspace manager mine wouldn't drag either, obviously a bug that still needs to be worked out.
As for Thunderbird it's what I use on all my systems and it works great though I doubt I use Exchange 2010 server since I have no idea what it is so I don't have the same issue you had.
I find it interesting how both of our separate experiences were so different. Weird.

Ubuntu and Mint now both come with OfficeLibre but you can load OpenOffice if you so wish. One of the cool things is, for years now, I've been opening Word Documents in OpenOffice with ease, I'm sure that function is present in Officelibre.
 
Yeah...I experienced the same thing with Ubuntu 11...just slow.
I am still running 10.04 on the main desktop with a bazillion bells and whistles installed...I have compiz configured to the max...and the machine is still quite fast.
LinuxMint used to be slower than Ubuntu, especially the boot process...but not now.
I have mint 11x running on a 5 year old Dell and it is acceptably speedy...the boot up is about a minute and a half or so, but it is a 5 year old laptop with 512 RAM.
 
Whether you're Ubuntu11.10, Mint12 or any other current Linux operating system with Gnome Shell you'll definitely want the Gnome Tweak Tool.

All you do is open terminal and type (or copy and past from here)

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

Hit enter, put in your password and hit enter again.

It loads in Advanced Settings, allowing one to easily add more Themes and Shell Extensions.

:thup:
 
Ringel05 said:
Whether you're Ubuntu11.10, Mint12 or any other current Linux operating system with Gnome Shell you'll definitely want the Gnome Tweak Tool.

All you do is open terminal and type (or copy and past from here)

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

Hit enter, put in your password and hit enter again.

It loads in Advanced Settings, allowing one to easily add more Themes and Shell Extensions.

:thup:
Click to expand...

Yup...it is an extremely easy and well laid out application that covers an amazing amount of stuff. For the gui - Compiz config is the bomb...everything else - tweak.
 
Uncensored2008 said:
So I got the new Ubuntu to install. I downloaded another package and this one worked. I went with the recommended 32 bit version. It COULD well be that the reason the 32 bit is recommended is that the 64 bit simply doesn't work.

It was a LONG install, well over an hour. That seemed a bit odd, but everything went smoothly. Performance is sub-par in general. Boot time from the boot menu is a little over 2 minutes. Mint boots in about 45 seconds and Windows 7 in about 20 seconds. This machine is an I7 960 clocked to 3.7 - I may drop it to stock and see if Ubuntu performs better, native is 3.2 on this CPU.

First thing I did was look at the display properties to configure the duel display setup. It easily detected both monitors and allowed me to extend my desktop to both with different resolutions and aspect ratios for each. I noticed that it was using a default driver and had my Nvidia GTX-460 tagged as "unknown." Now Unity handled multiple displays with transparencies fully intact without the Nvidia driver, which is pretty impressive.

So I went to the Nvidia site and downloaded the only Linux driver they bothered to supply. Went to the driver manage and tried to activate - driver failed. Hmm, this is obviously the same driver that works with Mint, given that it's the ONLY driver offered by Nvidia for Linux, on this card. Oh well, other than speed I'm not sure it does much.

Unity is a nice looking interface. I think it beats traditional Gnome. But it isn't in the same league as Aero-Glass, not that anything is. The designers opted for two docking bars, and did so because Unity lacks the Aero features of stacking, open many programs and the overly-large icons eat up the main dock. So they added a top dock (movable) to show tasks like mail and search. It shows the lack of elegance in the GUI that this is needed. Also missing is the peek feature of Aero. Hold your mouse over a dock icon in Aero and a preview of the program is displayed, put the mouse over the preview and the window is displayed. This is the type of interface functionality that makes Aero so much better than anything else on the market, Unity doesn't live up to this. Another irritation with the interface is the inclusion of a really nice workspace manager - that does nothing. Click on it and it shows all four workspaces in a grid. Cool, I'll drag this window to that workspace and... Wait, they won't drag... Shit, it just previews, I can't actually manage my workspaces with it.. WTF?

This is not the fault of Ubuntu, but Thunderbird is still crap and can't communicate with an encrypted Exchange 2010 server. So no email with Ubuntu - same with Mint. Good thing the OWA has gotten pretty good over the years.

The Citrix receiver worked flawlessly, as it does in Mint.

Over all, Ubuntu is quit sluggish, everything lags and tasks take far longer than they should on a relatively powerful machine. Some of this may be due to graphics drivers, but most of it isn't. 11.10 just isn't quick. Mint and Windows 7 are vastly more responsive on the same hardware. This leaves me to view Ubuntu 11.10 as "merely okay." Mint runs much better as a Linux distro, and Windows 7 still is light years ahead of both in interface and over all functionality.
Click to expand...
Try Sylpheed.
 
Considering that I find Mint 12 slow on my old P4 Dell, in comparison with my fast home build. Not to mention that fact that now, since the novelty of Gnome Shell has worn off and I find it less functional then the old Gnome 2 setup, I decided to retry Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu 11.10 versions.
While Kubuntu and Lubuntu are lightweight and fast I had issues with some apps not loading properly or freezing up not to mention update and download problems.
Finally I tried Xubuntu, tried it for a while then re installed Mint to give both a proper side by side comparison.
I've discovered I do indeed prefer Xubuntu, faster, no Gnome Shell interface and very configurable, When installing, select the 'install updates' and 'install 3rd party software' boxes and you don't have to install the restricted files separately though there will be a ton of updates you'll still have to install after you first boot up, just like in Windows.
The interface is still Gnome 3 but much closer to the old Gnome 2 look but you'll still have a sleight learning curve getting used to the layout.
Xubuntu found and configured all my hardware without a hitch, recognized my graphics card and offered to let me download and install the proprietary drivers for it.
Xubuntu also comes with the Ubuntu Software Center with it's thousands of packages (apps to those familiar with Windows) to choose from.
 
What I am excited about is;

{That's when Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, released a version of the operating system core that bridges between the two worlds. Version 3.3 of the Linux kernel is the beginning of the end of isolation between these two projects.

Down under the covers, every Android phone is a Linux phone. Although programmers writing Android apps generally use a Java-like interface, a Google-customized version of Linux handles underlying details such as keyboard input, multitasking among different chores, and keeping needed data readily at hand in memory. }
Linux and Android, together at last | Deep Tech - CNET News

Since I see Android as the future in mobility, this is good news.
 
Okay, I decided to give Kubuntu another shot simply because I love the Plasma interface on the 11.10 version. Did a little digging online and discovered fixes to the couple of issues it had. The primary two being it would lock up halfway through the update and the Muon Software Center not loading.
For the software center issue, until Ubuntu fixes whatever they did on their end, simply use the Muon Package Manager to install packages. As for the update freezing, open Terminal, type "sudo apt-get update" (without the quotations) and it will run to the freeze point then tell you which command to type (or copy and past) to fix it. Type or copy and paste the command, enter, issue fixed, update completed and afterwards all updates can be performed in the usual way without Terminal.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98D59kLQmFo&feature=related]Kubuntu 11.10 - YouTube[/ame]

And some tweaks you can make as you become more comfortable with it:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZXI5DXCPuI]Kubuntu plasma desktop - YouTube[/ame]
 
Ringel05 said:
I found this for the hard core types who might have "build my own OS" on their bucket list, LFS, or Linux From Scatch.

Welcome to Linux From Scratch!

And online distro building:

How to build your own Linux distro | TuxRadar Linux

Or just go to SUSE Studio.

Welcome – SUSE Studio
Click to expand...

I wrote an OS from scratch in 6502 assembly back in 1981. It wasn't much, command line only - which everything was. I did it because the assembler for the Apple II was bloody awful and wouldn't allow labeling, only allowing direct memory input. This meant that any change meant reinputting all instructions past the insert point. I wrote the OS specifically to allow indirect reference of memory via labeling. I would write code in my custom OS, then once the code was complete, reboot to ProDOS and run the program as normal. It only worked on the Apple II because I used BIOS calls that were specific to that machine for keyboard, disk, and display. I considered modifying it to run on Commodore, but never did.

B800 hex, start of the screen buffer for the Apple II... Nostalgia.

I have no desire to ever write an OS again.
 
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