Live data from Hacker News

Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

releases.ubuntu.com

281–290 of 307 posts

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#281
post #86

I have been at a clients location with my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop today. The "IT guy" there and all the other (non IT) office staff asked me what this is and how they could get it. I had to do a full 15 minutes of explanations about Ubuntu. You cannot imagine the looks after I told them it is free.

Firstly I will say, I like Microsoft. I'm sitting here on a Win7 laptop (dual boot Ubuntu) and have a Windows Phone next to me. But I don't like the culture that follows it around. I like Ubuntu and see it as a much more positive model and a more extensible, cheaper system. However we have some problems to contend with... Here's how it works where I work (SME - 100 people - UK - Financial sector): Show a user Ubuntu…

When I started at one large Brazilian portal, our ops team served both the home page and the images off IIS boxes. Many people on the team knew how stupid it was and there were scripts running (on Linux, obviously) scanning the Windows boxes for malware (every day or so, somehow, an infected flash or a defaced weaponized HTML file appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

The clueless idiot who managed the team kept on resurrecting benchmarks from the 90's on how Windows was better for serving static content. When it finally became obvious that all the problems were due to their technical choices, they botched two attempts to migrate the servers to Linux. They configured Apache in such a way it kept on allocating memory until the machines crashed every 25 hours or so. I won't attribute that to malice. They were really incompetent and misconfiguring a web server in this way required more brainpower than they had.

We eventually fired him and most of his minions. They now work at a Microsoft partner.

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really a pain to find a laptop that would not suck under Linux for any of the important dimensions (wifi, battery life, external monitor support, working fn keys and etc). I have nothing but good things to say about Dell computers. Of course, I am a bit careful not to choose ATI or Nvidia graphics or anything that seems designed to run only Windows. The v131 I'm using now works perfectly (and came with Ubuntu…

The trouble with Dell laptops is that the quality variance is really high. Mostly anecdotally speaking, I've found that the number of people who had a terrible experience with Dell and the number who had a good one are about equal. The most common problem is the battery conking out after a year or so, and then the replacement choice is either a ridiculously expensive one from Dell (which costs a third of the laptop i…

I had to buy mine in the US. :-(

I don't think they are available in Brazil either and, in any case, the keyboard layout is not to my taste.

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really a pain to find a laptop that would not suck under Linux for any of the important dimensions (wifi, battery life, external monitor support, working fn keys and etc). I have nothing but good things to say about Dell computers. Of course, I am a bit careful not to choose ATI or Nvidia graphics or anything that seems designed to run only Windows. The v131 I'm using now works perfectly (and came with Ubuntu…

The trouble with Dell laptops is that the quality variance is really high. Mostly anecdotally speaking, I've found that the number of people who had a terrible experience with Dell and the number who had a good one are about equal. The most common problem is the battery conking out after a year or so, and then the replacement choice is either a ridiculously expensive one from Dell (which costs a third of the laptop i…

And don't forget how awful Dell support is. I know someone who did their "on site" support... unbelievably bad.

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#285
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I went to Mint then back to Debian. Still, having to deal with terribly buggy ATI/AMD proprietary drivers, because I need openCL. If you can avoid ATI you shall be fine in Debian land.

I used to feel the same way, since finding in c. 2006 that using an ATI card with Linux was pretty much impossible. However, this all changed when I built a new machine last year, and wanted 3 monitors. Two monitors worked great with Nvidia; 3 was impossible. I've found that, although still a little buggy, 3 monitors w/ Ubuntu, ATI/AMD graphics card and "EyeFinity" works great (on KDE at least): http://wiki.cchtml.co…

If you use two different cards and some playing around with X.org you can get the nVidia drivers to play nice with 3 monitors.

Granted, it might be the most difficult configuration I've ever tried to figure out on *nix and I'm not trying to shoot you down, but for anyone reading your comment it's not actually "impossible".

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#286
post #86

I have been at a clients location with my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop today. The "IT guy" there and all the other (non IT) office staff asked me what this is and how they could get it. I had to do a full 15 minutes of explanations about Ubuntu. You cannot imagine the looks after I told them it is free.

Firstly I will say, I like Microsoft. I'm sitting here on a Win7 laptop (dual boot Ubuntu) and have a Windows Phone next to me. But I don't like the culture that follows it around. I like Ubuntu and see it as a much more positive model and a more extensible, cheaper system. However we have some problems to contend with... Here's how it works where I work (SME - 100 people - UK - Financial sector): Show a user Ubuntu…

Sad. I've used Linux ever since Windows Vista drivers prevented me from making programs full screen without crashing the OS. That was when I said enough.

I started with Ubuntu, but the updates always break on me. So now I'm giving a Debian a go. I'm amazed how much like Ubuntu 8.04-9.10 it is--the Gnome 2 desktop is nice and simple. That's unfortunately an option Canonical has taken away from its distro.

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#287

Is it safe to use this on servers yet?

I've been playing with it on EC2 and it just works.

I just upgraded from 10.04 and it stopped my 32 bit processes from starting.

The ia32-libs package somehow uninstalled itself. When I tried to reinstall it, it installed 300 mb worth of random libs instead of the usual 30.

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use gnome-shell instead of Unity on Ubuntu, and have multiple monitors. I use focus follows mouse not click to focus, so unity's whole app menu thing is ridiculous. I actually measured that I'd have to move the mouse over a metre on screen for my common window layout to get to menus. Sure I could fight all this, but I'd rather use something that is standard across distros and not Ubuntu proprietary. That said, gnom…

FWIW I spent 6 months running Gnome 3.0 on a laptop with a core 2 duo, intel graphics, and 4GB of RAM without noticing any performance problems.

That is the exact same spec as my laptop. I don't actually notice performance problems from gnome shell because I spend most of my time typing with short bursts of compilation etc. But when running top, gnome shell is always up there and has accumulated a huge amount of CPU time. More than X and the web browsers put together usually. Memory consumption varies so where I notice problems is when things have been swapped out because of gnome shell memory usage. I've never had it around 10gb but Alan Cox has https://plus.google.com/111104121194250082892/posts/5f5XXtRG...

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

still, kubuntu 12.04b2 is around 400Mb. I understand cache policy makes comparisons dumb, but I sleep better when my computer has less to manage. That said since it boots as a live cd .. a lot might just be the root fs. selfacepalm

If needed, you can make Kubuntu use even less by installing kubuntu-low-fat-settings

Thanks, since last kde update were performing so fast I forgot about this :)

Re: Ubuntu Releases 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

#290

Ok, I've just tried my 12.04 / Unity laptop with my 22" monitor. The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity launcher to the right hand side of my main screen, the 22" display, so that it doesn't get in the way of scrolling to the laptop's screen. Sounds simple right? Switching the launcher from left to right? Wrong. http://askubuntu.com/questions/123552/unity-launcher…

Ok, here's a simple workaround for now. It doesn't let you put the launcher on the right, but it lets you keep the launcher only on one window (the laptop in your case).

Go to System Settings > Displays. The "Launcher placement" is set to "All displays" by default. Change it to "Laptop" (or whatever screen's on the left).

Hope that helps.

Post reply on HN