Ubuntu Linux Catch-All [10.04 "Lucid Lynx": Released!]

Installing from the CD to work USB stick right now. The purple and gray makes the interface feel really Apple-like.

Has anyone here tried updating a USB install before? I'm a Linux newb and was hoping to keep my home USB stick profile/install persistent.

EvilDead wrote:

Installing from the CD to work USB stick right now. The purple and gray makes the interface feel really Apple-like.

Has anyone here tried updating a USB install before? I'm a Linux newb and was hoping to keep my home USB stick profile/install persistent.

I'd just back up the usb stick and then do an upgrade. Worst case scenario, you just recopy the files, right?

Runs great on the Macbook Pro. Battery life is abysmal though. I can get 5+ hours in OS X, 4-5 hours in Windows 7, and 2-3 in Ubuntu, even if I tweak the power settings. Maybe I can install one of those CPU throttlers to eke out some more juice.

Installed Windows XP in Virtualbox for Word and Zune, and it's zippy. I was immediately surprised by how many updates even XP SP3 requires right out of the gate (it's been awhile since I've dealt with XP.) It's too bad W7 takes up too much hard drive space for a virtual instance I only need to run Word.

Just for fun I tried out the Netbook Edition. It's pretty cool, but the locking down of all the panels is irritating (you can edit it to switch to Gnome and then still use the Netbook Launcher, but it's not easy.) I've decided that the awesomeness of Gnome-Do and Docky can make up for nearly any deficiency in interface design.

I used to love Amarok. But I'll admit I haven't used it in awhile and it just hasn't kept up with other media playing software. Sorting your collection is counter-intuitive and lacks the options that Zune, Songbird, and even iTunes provides. Looks like I'll be going with Banshee from now on.

One thing I miss with the Macbook touchpad is that in Ubuntu I can't tap-click with one finger and then drag with the other. If you put two fingers on the touchpad for any purpose other than scrolling, it just doesn't respond. So when you have to drag something across the screen, you end up clicking and dragging with the same finger, then when you get to the edge of the touchpad using your other finger to hold the button down while you move your original finger to the top again.

Essentially, it doesn't have multitouch. Bummer.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

One thing I miss with the Macbook touchpad is that in Ubuntu I can't tap-click with one finger and then drag with the other. If you put two fingers on the touchpad for any purpose other than scrolling, it just doesn't respond. So when you have to drag something across the screen, you end up clicking and dragging with the same finger, then when you get to the edge of the touchpad using your other finger to hold the button down while you move your original finger to the top again.

Essentially, it doesn't have multitouch. Bummer.

A driver is being worked on to provide this. If you hit the Mac-related Ubuntu forums, you'll find the thread. Last time I checked in, it was a bit confusing on how to get it installed, but I did have some success using it after doing so. It was being developed quite rapidly so I'm sure they've made more progress since then.

EDIT: Here's the thread. See the final post on page 13 for instructions.

I will update my 13" MBP to final Lucid release and give it a shot myself.

Also, when it comes to power usage, install powertop. It will clue you on in what's sucking down excessive juice, and offer some steps to help lower your power usage (be sure to look into laptop-mode-tools). And I think I will do the same with my MBP.

Finally, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is awesome. I run it on my EeePC. LOVE it.

Upgrading my fairly recent install of Kubuntu 9.10 (or whatever the last one was) to 10.04 trashed the install. Couldn't even get into console-only mode.

*Legion* wrote:
unntrlaffinity wrote:

One thing I miss with the Macbook touchpad is that in Ubuntu I can't tap-click with one finger and then drag with the other. If you put two fingers on the touchpad for any purpose other than scrolling, it just doesn't respond. So when you have to drag something across the screen, you end up clicking and dragging with the same finger, then when you get to the edge of the touchpad using your other finger to hold the button down while you move your original finger to the top again.

Essentially, it doesn't have multitouch. Bummer.

A driver is being worked on to provide this. If you hit the Mac-related Ubuntu forums, you'll find the thread. Last time I checked in, it was a bit confusing on how to get it installed, but I did have some success using it after doing so. It was being developed quite rapidly so I'm sure they've made more progress since then.

EDIT: Here's the thread. See the final post on page 13 for instructions.

I will update my 13" MBP to final Lucid release and give it a shot myself.

Also, when it comes to power usage, install powertop. It will clue you on in what's sucking down excessive juice, and offer some steps to help lower your power usage (be sure to look into laptop-mode-tools). And I think I will do the same with my MBP.

Finally, Ubuntu Netbook Remix is awesome. I run it on my EeePC. LOVE it.

I took the plunge, and I'd hold out on installing the MT driver right now. The vertical scrolling is a bit janky, and it disables tap clicking. The rest works pretty well though. Now I can't figure out how to uninstall it.

unntrlaffinity wrote:

I took the plunge, and I'd hold out on installing the MT driver right now. The vertical scrolling is a bit janky, and it disables tap clicking. The rest works pretty well though. Now I can't figure out how to uninstall it.

You might want to adjust some settings in the Mouse administration menu. I remember one thing I did before, based on tips earlier in the forum thread, was to lower the Drag & Drop Threshold slider, and tweak the sensitivity ones too.

The driver is working beautifully for me. The click and drag-with-2nd-finger is working so well that I'm now probably willing to use Linux as the primary OS on this machine.

Of course, as far as I'm concerned, tap to click = worst idea ever. Right up there with Crystal Pepsi.

To uninstall it, you'd probably want to purge the little "InputClass" snippet the install process had you add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

*Legion* wrote:

Of course, as far as I'm concerned, tap to click = worst idea ever. Right up there with Crystal Pepsi.

To uninstall it, you'd probably want to purge the little "InputClass" snippet the install process had you add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I actually tried that, and blew away my keyboard input somehow. Oops!

The problem I was having was with vertical scrolling with two fingers. As long as you were scrolling down, you could swipe like a madman with no problems. As soon as I tried to scroll up, the input would miss about half the attempts, resulting in my mouse cursor making its way to the top of the screen.

If you very slow swipe up with two fingers, it happens a lot less, but no amount of tweaking could make it work right for me.

I'm running it now on my reserved partition on my laptop. Seems zippy so far, but the only thing I've done is get my vid/NIC drivers installed and load up the Google Chrome dev build.

[Edit] Well, the Terminal Server Client is mostly nice, but I won't be switching to Ubuntu for my telecommuting environment. It's not near as smooth as the Microsoft client and it doesn't support font smoothing (blech!).

Are there any good sites for Linux newbies? I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu on my laptop but I've never used Linux. My main desire is install it is as a hobby and to play with something new and learn a new operating system. I have my desktop with Windows 7 for gaming and the only thing I'd want to do on my laptop is watch movies/mlb.tv and general internet stuff.

So pretty much all that stuff is going to work right out of the box.
Other than that, just harass Legion on twitter if google can't solve your problem. That's my solution.

Ulairi wrote:

Are there any good sites for Linux newbies? I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu on my laptop but I've never used Linux. My main desire is install it is as a hobby and to play with something new and learn a new operating system. I have my desktop with Windows 7 for gaming and the only thing I'd want to do on my laptop is watch movies/mlb.tv and general internet stuff.

There's actually something called Wubi included on the Live disc that will let you install Ubuntu from inside of Windows. When you boot, you'll have a menu that lets you choose Ubuntu or Windows (don't worry, if you choose nothing it defaults to Windows, which you can change later.)

It also allows you to access your Windows files through the "host" directory. What I did was set aside 10 gigs for Wubi, then after Ubuntu was done installing I changed all the default directories in Ubuntu to the ones on the Windows host drive to keep from using up all the space on the Linux loop partition.

What I mean is, you open Nautilus, which is the file manager for Ubuntu, then you go into the preferences and point the default directories like Downloads, Documents, Music, and Pictures to the equivalent directories on the Windows drive. I believe Ubuntu calls them "Bookmarks" for some reason, and you can add one for the host directory as well. For example, I have the "host/user/username" directory on my Windows drive bookmarked.) Then you can easily access the files you're dealing with no matter which OS you boot into.

Plus, another side benefit is that if you bork something, like I did three posts ago, you can just reinstall Wubi/Ubuntu without losing any of the files you've downloaded or created, and you're just out the time you spent customizing your settings. But remember that only works for the files you've saved into "host", not anything in the Wubi partition.

I'd recommend installing Gnome-Do and Docky right off the bat and deleting your bottom panel. They're pretty fantastic. Gnome-Do is like Launchy/Quicksilver. I'm experimenting with having the top panel/taskbar autohide, having my Docky taskbar autohide, and using Gnome-Do to do everything so every inch of screen real estate is available for programs, movies, or web browsing. When you're using Google Chrome, it's like having your own Chrome OS right there.

Oh! And Ubuntu Tweak is another fantastic application that makes it easy to change certain settings that would otherwise be aggravating to adjust manually.

The Ubuntu forums are pretty active, and mostly friendly, although you'll definitely run into the occasional "Duh. All you have to do is compile such and such from the source and run these command line scripts and then reboot while sacrificing a virgin ram on the altar of our dark lord Cthulu. God, why can't n00bs READ."

If my experience is any example, Linux distros are fun, you'll learn you can customize nearly anything about the OS you want with varying degrees of involvement and effort, and you will definitely f*ck something up at some point, so be sure to back up any data you don't want to lose.

If you want to watch movies, you'll probably want to install the "restricted" packages to allow MP3, XviD/DivX, DVD, and Flash playback. One downside is that Netflix streaming requires DRM, so even though people are working on Silverlight for Linux (I think it's called Moonlight), it doesn't support DRM and your Instant Watch won't play. On the upside, you still have Miro and Boxee.

Another thing that always confuses me at first when I haven't used Linux in awhile. File names, directories, and whatnot are case sensitive. So if you're wondering why you can't "cd documents" it might be because the name is actually "Documents".

Gnome-Do is excellent. I'm not a fan of Docky, though. Mainly because the best part of the GNOME bottom panel is the virtual desktop widget. I love that it shows the open window shapes and the icons representing each window. Very handy.

I have had a weird problem where I could not bind Do to use Control-Space. It would recognize it in its options when setting that shortcut, but it would not come up when striking that key combo. It would work with Windows-Space or Alt-Space, but I don't like the "feel" of my fingers hitting those.

Currently, I am using backtick for Do - like the old Quake console.

Weird, I just installed Gnome-do a while ago and it let me use CTRL-Space (and it works). That's what I've always used for my launcher app, plus Win-Space and Alt-Space are already used in Windows.

Oh man, I just installed Dropbox and discovered the joy of symbolic links. I think it's love.

LiquidMantis wrote:

Weird, I just installed Gnome-do a while ago and it let me use CTRL-Space (and it works).

Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Ctrl-Space is supposed to work. I kinda like the Quake console style keystroke, though, so I don't know if I'm going to bother hunting down the issue. I may try it on one of my other machines to see if they have the same issue or not, though.

According to Powertop, Docky sucks up a fair bit of juice, so I uninstalled it. I'm now running top and bottom panels with hide buttons to get them out of the way. It'd be nice if the hide buttons were capable of auto-hiding, since they sometimes stick out over menus and titlebars.

I can get about 3 hours in Ubuntu now. Not bad, but still a lot less than W7 or OS X.

Powertop also reported idle USB devices like the card reader as active, which I never use, and I haven't found a method of disabling those functions while idle that I feel confident I won't bork.

I managed to get Dopbox syncing the same folders through symbolic links in Windows and Linux, so that's nifty.

Can you disable the card reader in BIOS?

Don't forget to install laptop-mode-tools. Disk idling is not on by default in Lucid. Installing that package will enable it.

Here's a forum post with some info.

I think I'm going to go hunting through the forums for more power saving tweaks. I mean I've got three laptops running Lucid now, I probably should look into it.

*Legion* wrote:

Don't forget to install laptop-mode-tools. Disk idling is not on by default in Lucid. Installing that package will enable it.

Here's a forum post with some info.

I think I'm going to go hunting through the forums for more power saving tweaks. I mean I've got three laptops running Lucid now, I probably should look into it. :)

When you pick that package it tries to remove the power tools package that is installed by default. Since I wasn't sure what either package did that the other didn't, I erred on the side of caution. But most of the forum posts seem to assume you're dealing with laptop-mode-tools instead of pm-utils-powersave.

Plus, all that talk of HDD tweaks and whether or not it harms your HDD in the long run sounded like dark magic to my ears. Is that post suggesting that even if that's true, the heat will damage it more than any of the suggested tweaks?

LiquidMantis wrote:

Can you disable the card reader in BIOS?

I'm not sure. Wouldn't that turn it off completely though? It'd just be nice if when there wasn't a card actually in the reader it shuts down. Does it work like an remote receiver, where it has to be drawing at least a little power all the time?

unntrlaffinity wrote:
LiquidMantis wrote:

Can you disable the card reader in BIOS?

I'm not sure. Wouldn't that turn it off completely though? It'd just be nice if when there wasn't a card actually in the reader it shuts down. Does it work like an remote receiver, where it has to be drawing at least a little power all the time?

Oh yeah, if you turn it off in BIOS it'll be completely deactivated. I thought you meant you didn't use it all. I'm assuming the I/O chip for the reader is energized at all time for insertion detection. It probably has some sort of sleep mode though I'd assume, probably requiring driver support.

This was linked on Lifehacker. Might be good for anyone who's curious about Ubuntu. I'm going to read it too, since I'm not exactly and expert.

http://ubuntu-manual.org/

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...
Ubuntu 10.04 vs Win7 power consumption

Scratched wrote:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...
Ubuntu 10.04 vs Win7 power consumption

That makes sense. When I originally installed Windows 7 on my Macbook Pro, its battery life was incredibly poor. After I upgraded the video card drivers, it was giving me 4-5 hours easy, compared to 5-6 for OS X. With Lucid I get maybe three hours, if I'm sure to adjust the power saving settings manually, as I haven't had much luck with the built-in power management doing the job on its own.

I am in the market for a new laptop that will be used 100% for work - web development/programming (no gaming). I want to dual boot Win7 and 10.04. I am moving from a 3 year old MacBook Pro. The new W510 Thinkpad looks pretty nice and has gotten some good reviews. I love the Thinkpad keyboards and the build quality on these machines has always been pretty high. One thing I am picky about - no glossy screen. I HATE the new high gloss screens that are on just about every laptop today. Looking at code all day on a high gloss screen makes me cross eyed. I also do Photoshop work and the color quality on high gloss is typically not very good.

Any suggestions?

Hmmmm. My thinkpad from 3 ish years ago has a matte screen. Is it no longer an option on the lenovo site?

boogle wrote:

Hmmmm. My thinkpad from 3 ish years ago has a matte screen. Is it no longer an option on the lenovo site?

No it is, which is why I am considering the W510. I just wanted to see if their were other options people might recommend. System76 is also appealing since they put Ubuntu on the machines as the primary OS.

jakeleg wrote:
boogle wrote:

Hmmmm. My thinkpad from 3 ish years ago has a matte screen. Is it no longer an option on the lenovo site?

No it is, which is why I am considering the W510. I just wanted to see if their were other options people might recommend. System76 is also appealing since they put Ubuntu on the machines as the primary OS.

From my experience of having put on ubuntu fresh 3 times, Go for the thinkpad.
Build quality is what sells it, and there is a ton of support at thinkwiki.com.
I enjoy the matte screen.

Absolutely *loving* this release. I can't believe how fast it is on an old unused laptop.

boogle wrote:
jakeleg wrote:
boogle wrote:

Hmmmm. My thinkpad from 3 ish years ago has a matte screen. Is it no longer an option on the lenovo site?

No it is, which is why I am considering the W510. I just wanted to see if their were other options people might recommend. System76 is also appealing since they put Ubuntu on the machines as the primary OS.

From my experience of having put on ubuntu fresh 3 times, Go for the thinkpad.
Build quality is what sells it, and there is a ton of support at thinkwiki.com.
I enjoy the matte screen.

Sort of what I am thinking as well. Unfortunately, the 'FHD" displays for this model are on a long backorder. Definitely want the nicer HD display so I may have to wait a few months until the Lenovo supply situation improves.

jakeleg wrote:
boogle wrote:
jakeleg wrote:
boogle wrote:

Hmmmm. My thinkpad from 3 ish years ago has a matte screen. Is it no longer an option on the lenovo site?

No it is, which is why I am considering the W510. I just wanted to see if their were other options people might recommend. System76 is also appealing since they put Ubuntu on the machines as the primary OS.

From my experience of having put on ubuntu fresh 3 times, Go for the thinkpad.
Build quality is what sells it, and there is a ton of support at thinkwiki.com.
I enjoy the matte screen.

Sort of what I am thinking as well. Unfortunately, the 'FHD" displays for this model are on a long backorder. Definitely want the nicer HD display so I may have to wait a few months until the Lenovo supply situation improves.

I know they have a large back to school discount around august if you end up waiting till then. I got like 400 off mine when I bought it.