Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

Posted Oct 16, 2011 23:27 UTC (Sun) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404)
Parent article: Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

"There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher."
- Victor Hugo

A poor average programmer's experience with ocelot..

About the same as the previous version, but harder to fix.

Upgrade to Ocelot.
Looks pretty.
Start working.
Computer starts making lots of annoying, distracting noises.
Compiz at 30% of the CPU on a 4 core 8 GB ram, while I'm surfing the web.
My calming background wallpaper has been replaced with a suicidally black background.

*sigh*

apt-get install gnome-panel
login to gnome classic.
clock is sitting in the middle of the panel, no way to move it around or resize the panel.
Wallpaper still black.. find/locate reveals it's been deleted off the machine... thank you Mark Shuttleworth...
Spend an half-hour or more to find background again on web.
Spend another half-hour or more trying various tricks to unlock panel.
Finally go into dconf & resize panel & change padding or something to move clock to right.

*sigh*

I just spent two hours to make it work like before & nothing's better.

Going into dconf reminding me of going into win7 registry at work to constantly re-enable various effects on remote desktop. Inability to reconfigure anything reminds of of my Mac that doesn't let me enlarge the fonts, and has applications that assume that I run at a certain resolution..

Time to find a new distribution for lazy people that just want to program (eclipse/gvim/mysql/java/python) and surf the web (firefox/flash disabled on everything except hulu), and not spend hours configuring their OS...

What Ubuntu used to be .. and why I've been using it for years, and installing it everywhere I can at work.

Another distribution slowly going down the drain. Ah well. Maybe I'm curmudgeonly enough for debian stable now?

From Ubuntu to Linux Mint

Posted Oct 17, 2011 11:05 UTC (Mon) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

Maybe Debian or Linux Mint are good options. Mint seems quite sane, fousing on stability and incremental improvements (some nice GUI admin/update tools) without getting in the way of those who know and like conventional Linux. It's aimed at new users but is not over-simplified and stll has a reasonable GNOME setup. See http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint

It comes in Ubuntu-based versions (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, etc) that follow the Ubuntu releases, but are still GNOME 2.x based for now; and also has a rolling-release Debian edition (LMDE) based on Debian Testing, which comes in GNOME and XFCE versios. See http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Linux Mint 9 is the LTS equivalent of Ubuntu 10.04 - I've been testing Linux Mint 11 a bit, and so far it is much nicer to use than recent Ubuntu versions. LMDE seems like a nicely packaged version of Debian but I haven't tried it.

I did install Ubuntu 11.10 briefly but found many annoying issues (launcher won't reliably slide out, the Dash sometimes won't accept keyboard input, EDID was sensed OK to set monitor size on live CD, but not when installed to disk, etc.) Having had a nightmarish Lucid 10.04 upgrade, I am now parting company with Ubuntu in the hope that Mint is better.

I will use Mint 11 (Ubuntu based) initially to get the latest hardware support for one PC with Intel GMA3100 GPU, but I may go for LMDE for my main PC.

Ubuntu still seems like a good option for at least web-oriented servers as it has the combination of rapid security updates (unlike CentOS these days), widespread support by cloud projects (unlike Debian and CentOS), and some commercial acceptability (most VPS and cloud providers support it). Ubuntu 11.10 also has Xen support at last through Linux 3.0, so I could run test instances of VPSs on a local server.

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

Posted Oct 17, 2011 11:08 UTC (Mon) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

On the 'disable flash' thing - just install the Flashblock addon for Firefox and permit only the few sites that you need. This works on any OS.

You should also install NoScript of course but Flashblock is better for Flash blocking.

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

Posted Oct 17, 2011 14:12 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (3 responses)

FYI, you can customize the 'fallback' gnome-panel in the same way you did in GNOME 3 by holding the alt button before you right click on it.

I actually really like this change, but until I read about it on some random blog post on the web, I too thought that they had removed the ability to customise the panel at all, and was quite grumpy.

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

Posted Oct 17, 2011 17:41 UTC (Mon) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

Requiring Alt to be held down for customisation is pretty non-discoverable... not very good UI design.

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

Posted Oct 17, 2011 18:11 UTC (Mon) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (1 responses)

It's better than what happened before. I have never seen a non-technical user's not eventually totally screw up their GNOME 2 desktop; it's far too easy to accidentally move, or remove, vital panel components such as the main menu or the window list.

I agree that the discoverability needs to be improved, but I've never used a bit of software where this couldn't not be stated to be the case. :)

Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

Posted Oct 17, 2011 18:15 UTC (Mon) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

It is possible to lock down GNOME desktops with some gconf hacks (but those aren't discoverable either)... I guess it depends who you are optimising for.