Ubuntu 11.10 - Yay or Nay

I have been running Ubuntu since 5.10 upgrading to the latest each time it is released with 11.10 being no exception. I’ve been a huge fan of Gnome for quite some time. What I like best was its menu setup which was simple and intuitive. KDE always felt too much like Windows and it seemed very bloated. I have not tried it again in several years. I’ve read it is much improved and I’m sure is a solid product.

Ubuntu 11.10 bring many new features and changes, the first big one you see when booting the new system is the login screen. LightDM is now used and it brings to the table a faster loading speed as well as a very clean look.

The second noticeable being Unity. With 11.04 I never tried Unity and immediately changed back to the classic gnome interface. With Gnome 3.0 now in 11.10, I tried this and the old interface is very rugged, doesn’t work right and is nothing like it was with Gnome 2. I was very unhappy with this as I did not want to learn a whole new interface.

Since my preferred interface is now gone with Gnome 3, my only options are Gnome Shell or Unity. I tried Gnome Shell and it gave me nothing but issues on my desktop. It had display issues and I didn’t look into it any further.

I switched back to Unity to give it a try and see if I could learn to use it. I still liked the old Gnome interface for my desktop but I am liking several things about Unity on my laptop. The first is that you have more screen space. This is very nice for my laptop to get extra viewing space. But on my desktop with its high resolution monitor, it is more of a hindrance because it is now harder to switch between running applications. Unity has been stable for me so far. It had its quirks in 11.04 which is another reason I kept my distance but it is clear a lot of work has gone into making it more stable.

As for the rest of Ubuntu, the new software center is very nice. There are a lot of games and applications available now to purchase as well as a nice interface to find applications you may want to try. It provides a nice description of the applications with nice selection of screenshots of the applications to get a feel for what it is.

Other small changes include Thunderbird replacing Evolution, Linux Kernel 3.0, LibreOffice 3.4 and Firefox 7. Ubuntu is also using Deja Dup for doing backups. The new Ubuntu Software Center has replaced Synaptic but you can install it still if you prefer.

I am pleased with the latest updates and am pleased to see Ubuntu making strides to stand out from the other Linux distributions. I will miss the Gnome 2 interface but Unity is working very nicely on my laptop and the future is looking bright.

Next on my agenda is to give Desura, a digital distribution for gamers that supports Linux, a try to see if this could be the next big for Linux.

Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon

The latest version of Ubuntu was released but I didn't jump on the wagon right away to upgrade. I felt that nothing in the newer version had anything new I needed and that it wouldn't make a difference for me. Well, much to my surprise I was wrong. The new version doesn't have any major changes, just a lot of little ones.

So, the new version adds in all the latest programs like Firefox 2.0, Pidgin 2.2.1, OpenOffice 2.3 and Gnome 2.2 containing all of its goodness. In the new Gnome many enhancements were made to improve performance, features and usability.

One of the changes in Gnome is its interface. They have updated the themes a little bit and the way you select the theme. Now, you have all the theme related stuff (theme, background, font, interface, visual effects) in one place separated by tabs. The standard themes are nice (I like the new Clearlooks in dark blue) but you can always download or customize your own. There has been a change to the visual effects part. In Ubuntu 7.04 they added the ability to turn on and off special effects (compiz) by opening the "special effects" application. Now this has been moved into this new tabbed interface. For the special effects, there are three options. You can have no special effects, some effects (transparency and such) or full blown effects (wobbly windows).

One new application is the "Screens & Graphics" program in Ubuntu. This program allows you to easily setup your video card driver and monitors through a simple GUI interface. Now, I tried and tried, but I couldn't get this interface to get things setup for me. I have a unique monitor though that doesn't get properly detected so I'm not surprised to see an issue here so I manually went and setup my monitor the old fashioned way.

They have also upgraded Gaim where it is now the new Pidgin (the replacement for Gaim). The new interface was adapted nicely to the Ubuntu theme. I didn't like the new Pidgin at first when I used it in Windows but they have made several changes to its Linux counterpart and I must say, it fits in very nicely. Its default settings are very light and don't consume unneeded space.

For networking there has also been a big improvement. Ubuntu now has a nice GUI interface that easily lets you allow which network you want to connect to. It now integrates with wpa_supplicant so you just plug into the GUI interface the information (passcode, type and such) and it will then connect. It worked very nicely, though its nowhere near perfect yet but it is a step in the right direction.

Those are the major enhancements. Most of the other changes are small but nice. One major thing I noticed in the upgrade was the performance. My installation of Ubuntu on my computer was actually Ubuntu 5.10. I have upgraded the distribution 5 times now. I'm not sure at what point Firefox started performing slowly for me, but I had noticed recently that Google Docs and flash videos sometimes slowed down the system and if I tried to multi-task with one of these open and running the whole system would come to a halt. I found though, once I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 7.10 I was flying along in Firefox. It performs now like I upgraded my computer or something. I'm interested now to boot up the previous version and see if was just a bad upgrade or if it is the version of Firefox. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, all that matters is the new version with Firefox is fast and reliable.

All in all, the new version of Ubuntu is very usable, and they have added a few new utilities that will make it easier for the average user, but there is still some work to be done.

Ubuntu - ATI - Dual Monitors in Gnome

So, once I got my second LCD, it wasn't long until I was looking into how to get it setup in Linux.

It didn't take me long to get to a good walk through. The issue was I couldn't get the walk through to work. I was copying and pasting the commands in the guide, but nothing seemed to be changing in the xorg.conf file. As it turns out, the dashes in the guide, don't paste as the correct dashes into the gnome terminal. So, I just typed the command myself and it then worked fine.

So, I got it setup and the login screen would work fine with the extended desktop mode but as soon as I logged into Gnome it would cut into cloning mode. It took me a while to find out what the issue was, but with a refined search into Google I finally found the answer. I had to delete an entry from the Gnome configuration which was setting the resolution every time I logged in.

Once this was taken care of then all was working properly with Gnome and its extended desktop. Now, Gnome doesn't have a nice configuration utility that allows you to easily turn off extended desktop and such. But, in Ubuntu, when I go to the screen resolution program, I see that the resolution I'm running when in extended desktop is 2048x1536. So, if I just bump this down to 1280x1024, then it switches to cloning.

So, I'm enjoying the extra screen space in Linux and am quite impressed with how well it handles the dual screen setup.

Here are some useful links that will helped me get my setup running.

ATI Dual Monitor Setup - Don't copy & paste the commands from this article

Beryl Project

Ubuntu Forums - fix Gnome so it supports the dual-view

My Linux History

I was first introduced to Linux 4 years ago as I was starting my freshman year at Lake Superior State University. My roommate was quite into it. Later that year I got my first computer and I then made two partitions, one for Windows and one for Linux.

My roommate used RedHat 7.3, so that's what I tried. At the time, RedHat 8 had just come out, but I didn't have the CD'S for that install. So, I tried using RedHat, but it was more of a mess around for a few minutes, then boot back into Windows to play games and stuff. I tried to use RedHat but it was just to hard for me to get everything to work. Mainly the sound. For whatever reason my integrated sound would not get recognized.

I didn't use RedHat a whole lot. I did however get Xemacs setup, and wrote several of my class programs in there. We were learning C++ so it was quite nice using Linux for writing projects. Many of my classmates went out and bought the IDE that the professor was using where I used Linux and the free Xemacs which actually got the job done better.

That wasn't enough to keep me away though. Sometime the following spring, they released RedHat 9. I downloaded and installed it. It was much cleaner looking than 7.3 and detected my sound card without a problem. The problem came when I tried to play my mp3's. This was after the time when the distribution had to stop shipping with thecodecs . I eventually got the sound working, but it wasn't the most reliable thing. The system would lockup often. It wasn't to long before I stopped booting into RedHat and just used Windows again.

The following year, I tried a distribution name ALT Linux. It was recommended to me by my brother. I tried it and it worked very well for me. I was using KDE and I was able to figure out most things on my own to get what I needed done. I had been already using Gaim and OpenOffice in Windows so I was very familiar with them already. ALT Linux, like most other distribution came with Mozilla web browser. This was my web browser of choice in Linux. (in Windows I did used Opera) The first semester I had a Java class so I did most of the programming in Windows, though I did mess around with compiling some of the projects in Linux. The following semester I had a C++ class as well as a class that used Borland Delphi to connect to a database. I then used Windows to do all of my programming. I did occasionally boot into Linux, just because it felt cool to use it.

The following summer I got a laptop from my Grandma. Initially I put Windows 98 on it, then I got Windows 2000. Once school started my programming class was with Perl. We had to telnet into a UNIX machine. Working in Unix got me wanting to try Linux again. So I installed ALT Linux on my laptop. It didn't go well. The sound didn't work and the mouse did quirky things. So, off I went to find another distribution that might suite my needs. I instantly found Mandrake 10.0 and gave it a try. It worked great and it even detected my mouse pads scroll section. It, however, still didn't work with the sound card off installation (though I did eventually get it working) but it ran very stable, and everything else worked great. I enjoyed Mandrake very much and using telnet in the console of Mandrake was much easier than using it in Windows.

I continued to use Mandrake heavily all year. The spring semester I worked a lot with C++ and had to use ssh a lot. Linux was very handy for this. That following summer though, I got tired of KDE. It was to bloated for my laptop. Eventually I settled down on IceWM. It was very light, easy to configure, was in Mandrake's package manager and could be setup how I wanted. Now my laptop ran loaded much faster and ran better.

Now I was to the point where I used Linux more than Windows. I would do everything on my Laptop that I could. The only time I used my desktop was when I wanted to play games.

Now came my Senior year. I was using and loving Mandrake. I made friends with some freshman and they were excited about the new release of Ubuntu. Now, I'd been using Linux for a while, but I'd never done much looking at what the other distributions had. I was pretty much just looking and keeping updated with, what at this point was Mandriva. So, they installed Ubuntu and showed me all of its simplicity. After seeing it, and Gnome, I wanted it. I like its package manager way better than Mandriva's and its hardware detection was supposed to also be very good.

So, I eventually made the switch from Mandriva 2006 to Ubuntu 5.10. It was a complete success. I loved it. Gnome ran just as well as IceWM on my laptop, but looked and felt so much better. I've now been using Ubuntu for over a year and its hard for me to even think about trying another distributions.Ubuntu has such a large user base that there are so many applications that are easily accessible without having to worry about dependencies.

Currently I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 on my desktop and laptop and my server (the server has Ubuntu Server Edition) and am loving every minute of it.