Ubuntu 8.04

[D2k Sardaukar]

You know, in GTA 4 there is a website with a joke about a Linux OS, that it takes ages to install anything. Your reply reminds me of that... it took you hours to simply use your scanner... lol, come on... that's no fun.

I think it's great that there are OS's for free, but the time you need to spend to get it to work is just too much...

[Andrew]

Now that I know how to get it to work, I shouldn't have to spend much time getting it to work in the future.

It's working now, and it should continue working until I format. So spending 2 hours to get it to work and have it last 6 months is ok. Then I format and install new ubuntu version, and now that I have documented how to get it to work, it should only take a couple minutes to get it working.

The scanner is part of "all in one" canon mp360. My printer worked as soon as I installed ubuntu with no configuration needed. Getting the scanner to work was just another nail in the coffin for my windows partition.

EDIT:

I just finished with a relatives vista laptop. McAfee was complaining I needed to register the product in order to get updates, so the antivirus that came with vista was useless and I uninstalled it (not paying or dealing with that crap). It came with MS Works which sucks. So I tried installing openoffice. openoffice gave an error, and it seems that I had to install .NET, then it installed fine.

So I spent an hour just updating some stuff on a 5 month old laptop and getting stuff to work. I spent several hours trying to figure out why sleep/suspend wasn't working several months ago. It had a continuous suspend/wake up from suspend, then go back into suspend. Had to hold power button to restart computer so it would stop doing that.

So Vista does not work perfect either.

EDIT:

oh yeah, the windows on screen keyboard program pops up every time the computer starts. I have no idea why it is, it is not in startup folder, and I see no setting in the program that says for it to start when computer starts. Any idea how to disable it?

Nevermind, a google search just explained to me how to get rid of it.

Type without using the keyboard (On-Screen Keyboard)

[Andrew]

9.04 Alpha 3 should be released by tomorrow. I will be the first alpha that should work somewhat.

As usual the best thing about newer versions of ubuntu is the updated software.

Notable mentions of newer software in 9.04:

- Openoffice 3.0.1 -3.1 probably won't make it.

- I started trying Lyx word processor. Much newer version available in Jaunty. Good for typing long papers.

- torrent apps (deluge, transmission), will have newer versions.

- Firefox 3.1

- Most music players I have tried will have slightly newer versions. Amarok 2.0 being the most important.

- Newer kernel. With new Kernel creating ext4 partitions will be possible, and ext4 is supposed to be much faster/better than ext3. It will not be default though. With new kernel and ext4, 9.04 is currently booting 10 seconds (~30%) faster than Intrepid with ext3 (31 seconds to 21 seconds) (phoronix website did tests).

I was kind of hoping a new xfce version would be out, but they are many months behind schedule (appears to have stalled). KDE 4.2 should be in it. Hopefully a new gnome as well.

8.04.2 should be released in a week (up to date 8.04 CD).

[Andrew]

A couple weeks ago I tried using VNC that came with ubuntu. Learned some stuff, but couldn't really do anything because my other computer on the network had puppy linux installed.

Today I installed alpha3 onto the old computer and successfully VNC into the old computer from new computer. Pretty cool having control over the old computer from new computer. Now I can do updates and stuff from here instead of going to the other computer.

I tried using ubuntu to connect to my winxp in virtualbox but that didn't work (probably because both are runing at same time on same computer).

Alpha 3 seems to work fine for me which is great. I used ext4 filesystem and no problems. Supposedly from some tests show that alpha 3 (or jaunty itself) boots 25% faster than previous ubuntu. I'm not greatly concerned with boot times, as 30 seconds is fine to boot. I'm more interested in the tests phoronix did that showed Jaunty on a SSD using ext4 was twice as fast as Intrepid using ext4. The SSD are looking very good for operating system speed.

How To Configure Remote Access To Your Ubuntu Desktop - is the tutorial I used mostly.

[gryphon]

VNC is supposed to be OS independent I thought. So Ubunto to Puppy, Windows or even OSX should all work fine.

For virtual machines. If the virtual machine has a VNC server and IP that can be accessed from other computers it should be working ok. My experience with VirtualBox is that network adapters are NAT'ed and not bridged. So connecting to them from workstations other then the virtual one and the host will not work by default.

I personally prefer other applications over VNC. The clients never react proper to scripted installations, I dislike the screen handling and thing it's slow.

Have you tried to install OSX on VirtualBox? That's one of the few things still on my wish-to-do-list. I have it working on VMware (OSX client and Server), just never tried it on VirtualBox. It's my understanding that VB is one of the few who make it possible (by default?). Just never got any time to try it thought.

I presume you know that Ubuntu is being ported to mobile devices? It's about time they learned how to write a server OS for a real type of server. ;)

(I know I'm oldfashioned and still believe ALPHA/SPARC/RISC is the way to go)

[Andrew]

Yah, I'm sure I could get vnc to work on puppy, but I was too lazy to spend time on it when ubuntu (and windows) is much easier to setup/maintain. This way I'm testing ubuntu 9.04 on an old computer before using it on new computer. See if any bad bugs appear.

Nope, never dealt with OSX at all.

Yep, I've been reading about ubuntu being ported to handheld devices. Should be interesting when more linux distros are available to put on handheld devices. some of the higher end devices I think have 1gb of ram, and with SSD (or whatever storage ram they are using), it shouldn't be difficult to get 10gb storage.

would be pretty cool having a smart phone or PDA that is able to sync perfectly with a desktop distro.