Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released • Hacker News Board

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#51

Post by nuclear_eclipse » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:10 PM UTC

siegler wrote: post #49

What are people's favorite guides for setting up Ubuntu? http://www.funnestra.org/ubuntu is really good but they don't have a 9.10 update yet.

`sudo do-release-upgrade` :)

In all seriousness, "guides" for setting up Ubuntu are most likely unnecessary or superfluous; they'll just go into some random area of "customization" that 95% of users probably don't need or care about.

If you already have an older version of Ubuntu, just run the command I mentioned, or go to System->Update Manager to handle the upgrade, and get on with your day. If you don't have Ubuntu, just boot the live disc and install it, and go from there.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#52

Post by runinit » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:10 PM UTC

mquander wrote: post #42

mikeyur wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly. The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?

I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.) Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configu…

In Arch the AUR directory has packages called fontconfig-ubuntu, cairo-ubuntu, and libxft-ubuntu , i found when i compiled those my font rendering was the same as ubuntus. Maybe Gentoo has the same packages, or you could grab the sources from AUR and compile them manually?

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#53

Post by davars » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:14 PM UTC

bretthoerner wrote: post #45

mquander wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.) Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configu…

The menus and title bars look great. But open Firefox and and go to Gmail or something and compare it to OS X.

Even with msttcorefonts installed?

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#54

Post by barmstrong » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:14 PM UTC

siegler wrote: post #49

What are people's favorite guides for setting up Ubuntu? http://www.funnestra.org/ubuntu is really good but they don't have a 9.10 update yet.

This is what I use when I need to setup a new server for a Rails app:

http://github.com/jnstq/rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#55

Post by santry » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:23 PM UTC

Sapient wrote: post #50

ghotli wrote: post #30

Some googling shows that the VMWare Tools are not yet compatible with 9.10. Does anyone know how quickly VMWare usually gets around to updating tools after an Ubuntu update?

I have given up on waiting for VMWare Tools to catch up and switched to VirtualBox from Sun. http://www.virtualbox.com Unless there is some strange functionality you need from VMWare that isn't supported in VirtualBox, I suggest giving it a try.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

FTFY

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#56

Post by pronoiac » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:23 PM UTC

natrius wrote: post #29

mseebach wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well, good point. My point was that a userfriendly distribution shouldn't present technical information that isn't absolutely vital. And it's really easy to find, by the way: http://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+requirements

Disk space requirements aren't obscure technical information. Providing it wouldn't confuse anyone, especially not anyone adept enough to install an operating system. It should be provided.

The difference between RAM & disk space continues to elude some, never mind megabytes versus gigabytes & now terabytes.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#57

Post by mrduncan » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:23 PM UTC

siegler wrote: post #49

What are people's favorite guides for setting up Ubuntu? http://www.funnestra.org/ubuntu is really good but they don't have a 9.10 update yet.

Slicehost has an excellent assortment of articles for Ubuntu (as well as plenty of other topics). It looks like they don't have any for Karmic yet though.

http://articles.slicehost.com/

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#58

Post by 10ren » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:25 PM UTC

It supports ARM; and a bunch of ARM-based netbooks are due out soon. They are cheaper and much more power efficient than intel's Atom etc. And Windows doesn't run on them (yet).

I'm not a big linux vs. windows or ARM vs. intel fanatic, but I'm excited at what seems to be a disruptive inflection point coming up in the next year or so...

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#59

Post by actf » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:29 PM UTC

megaman821 wrote: post #7

barnaby wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's coming out today, and it's going to get like a gazillion upvotes... so somebody wanted to earn the points by being the first to post. I've been using the beta for a while now, it is B.E.A.U.T.I.F.U.L. It's competing with OSX now (having surpassed Windows long long ago)

Actually, with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard out Ubuntu feels even further away from becoming mainstream. I want to like Linux on the desktop but looking at it objectively Win 7 and Snow Leopard are better.

I couldn't agree more. The last time I ran Ubuntu as my primary OS its desktop experience was a long ways from Windows or OSX. Compviz was full of bugs that in my opinion significantly detracted from the the overall desktop experience. I'd constantly run into problems where windows wouldn't be placed correctly on the screen or would have artifacts drawn in them. Some of the compviz effects would fail to run altogether - with almost no indication of why. On top of that I found the general desktop performance to be much slower than Windows and OSX. Specific examples of this would include: hiding/restoring/maximizing windows, scrolling through text and graphics, and moving windows. Add to that performance issues in firefox (which have been well documented), incomplete drivers (sleeping, graphics drivers, etc), and the obvious compatibility problems with running linux. Ubuntu is still more frustration than it's worth for a desktop OS imho.

Re: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

#60

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 29, 2009, 5:32 PM UTC

Sapient wrote: post #50

ghotli wrote: post #30

Some googling shows that the VMWare Tools are not yet compatible with 9.10. Does anyone know how quickly VMWare usually gets around to updating tools after an Ubuntu update?

I have given up on waiting for VMWare Tools to catch up and switched to VirtualBox from Sun. http://www.virtualbox.com Unless there is some strange functionality you need from VMWare that isn't supported in VirtualBox, I suggest giving it a try.

[deleted]