Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger Has Been Released

[Nomad559]

http://www.ubuntulinux.org

Download
http://releases.ubuntu.com/5.10

:)

[Solon]

1. Running it right now...

So far so good, probably has a bug or two I haven't encountered yet, but I can FINALLY edit the Gnome Menus! Love some of the other enhancements as well.

[trotsky]

8. Does BB feature WPA support for wireless connections?

I gave up trying to make it work on Hoary Hedgehog.

[Dogmudgeon]

2. Some Ubuntu/Breezy complaints

It's kind of slow on the output side. A lot of users are complaining about this. I'd say that about a third of the people on the Ubuntu support forums are complaining about it.

The solution, as far as I can tell, is that anyone's installation must be tweaked. The tweak for those running greater-than-Pentium-1 seems to be booting with the kernel compiled as *-586 instead of *-386. BUT ... I'm not going to just change the stanza in GRUB until I find whether the thing exists. Which is difficult with the file browsers in both Gnome and KDE desktops.

I was kind of enjoying Gnome, but having tried KDE, I think it's the superior desktop (though I am open to further persuasion). Konqueror seems to be a lot faster than either version of Firefox I've tried.

For me, the slowness is keyboard and display oriented. It's more sluggish than it was under Windows, even though the system overall is much more economical (5 GB of a 19 GB disk is being used, in spite of installing damn near every piece of software I could find in the repository) and the processing seems to be faster (printing is twice as fast).

Other users claim it's Ubuntu's use of the Metacity desktop manager, which somehow is used by Gnome. Discussing the architecture is somewhat more difficult because it seems to be made of several discrete chunks, unlike the more monolithic approach of Windows. (Again, see above.)

Speaking of repository, that system is nasty to use. How does anyone install software in Debian systems that isn't in the "universe" or "multiverse"? Just updating Firefox from 1.0.7 to 1.5b2 was painful, I hosed the shortcut by following the instructions on Ubuntu Wiki, and then wasn't permitted to make a new one.

So, no, Linux isn't all crimson and clover. But these are small complaints for a system that is better-designed overall and not jammed with a thousand proprietary pieces of code.

Anyway, if you have suggestions on how to optimize the system and get around some of the complaints I've made, let me know.

--p!

[Sgent]

3. Konquer

shouldn't be any different than Firefox once opened -- since they use the same rendering engine and backend. It is integrated better with the KDE shell.

I'm an old linux hack who usually compiles his own kernels, and there are definately compiler options to specify your processor -- and they can improve performance dramatically in some cases. I don't know if you can do it after compile time.

One option is to create a new entry in grub --- one with the option and one w/o, and test them out.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. I actually did that today

I installed both Gnome and KDE; I made KDE my default desktop. It's much easier to use, though I did like Gnome's simplicity. I also used the "Redmond" theme because I hate the "wet plastic" themes that KDE is known for.

And Konqueror is quite fast. So is Firefox. I got Firefox 1.5beta2 installed under Gnome, but couldn't make a link for it, so all the shortcut controls don't work and I have to go into its directory and manually start it up. I will come back to the problem when I have a little more savvy.

I'd like to eventually compile my own kernels, but that's a little further down the line. I still can't find a lot of the stuff I know is supposed to be there, and when I do find it, if I want to look around, the text editors are so smart that they usually lock me out of it.

Most of my "problems" now involve making my Linux data visible to my Windows setup. Sharing bookmarks and Linux supporting the URL/LNK file spec, for instance. Plus I have a whole 120 GiB NTFS volume full of data that won't auto-mount. Then there is the set of hassles getting the sound to work, since none of the proprietary CODECs (like MP3 and WMA) come supported. Some of these minor gotchas -- and there are plenty of them -- may dissuade casual users, so my work may be cut out for me!

But the big annoyance is Synaptic package manager. It seems to be impossible at this point to install software that isn't in the "universe" or "multiverse". I'm going to have to spend significant time on that beast.

Overall, though, I'm favorably impressed, and still hope to meet my 1/1/06 goal of being Linux-fluent and ready to make Win2k my secondary system instead of primary.

--p!

[Sgent]

5. Hmm...

I'm not quite sure, but I believe NTFS write support in Linux is still in the "expiremental" stage. I still keep an old 3G VFAT partition on my harddrive for shared information that both need to write to.

Once mounted, you should be able to read to NTFS, but writing is a little more quesitonalble.

As for automount problems, look in your /etc/fstab file to define what to automount or not. man fstab should give you some options, and if your manually mounting the partition now, figuring it out shouldn't be too hard.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. That's also pretty much what I've found out

NTFS support is coming along well, but it's still not 100%. A lot of people are using SAMBA and configuring the disk as a virtual network, but my network skills are woefully lacking (especially since I've done some pretty fancy API-in-VB stuff -- it must be a mental block stemming from my case of dementia halfcox).

I just found the fstab info last night, but kept poring over the info, thinking I had forgotten something. I used to manually mount with Ubuntu 5.04, but couldn't find the terminal in 5.10 until I also installed KDE.

I'm still just blundering my way around. I seem to be hitting a lot of permissions problems, too, like writing from my Linux disk to the Windows system disk. (The NTFS disk is the third disk, which I use as a library, and it's probably going to get turned back into a FAT32 disk once I've finished backing everything up).

Thanks again ... I'm sure I'll have a million more questions, but this forum's good fortune is that I learned early to RTFM, which keeps the questions down to under four digits' worth per day. :)

--p!

[Solon]

7. They moved the terminal in Gnome from System Tools to Accessories...

I don't know why, but it still works.