Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ‘Precise Pangolin’ discussion thread

[trasher]

Originally Posted by toXin

It's a helpful tool (can't understand why it wasn't included by default), open it up after you install it and it's under the desktop category I think, if not have a look around and just find whatever is enabled and is triggered by that key sequence.

There's an option in there called "corner", select top left corner and you're set to go.

Hey toxin, thanks for that - I'll try it soon. Unity is booting up to just the desktop tonight, without the taskbar or anything today, so I can't use it.. I guess I'll just reinstall and try installing the compiz manager then.

[tr3nton]

http://blog.didrocks.fr/post/Unity-5...eady-for-beta2!

As I write Unity 5.8 is currently building on our official builders and will reach ubuntu precise soon. For this release, a big part of the stack was uploaded (14 components) including unity, unity-2d, nux of course, but also compiz 0.9.7.2 and the lenses (with some ABI breaks in the middle).

What's new on this unity release? Well, you can see the 3d milestone and 2d bug fixes (look also at this one for unity 2d which landed last monday). Keep in mind also that some 3d bug fixes benefits 2d as well! So, a lot of bug unitfixes, but that's not only it! We also got some UI refinements, some very visible, some more hidden, but it's all those little touch which makes the whole experience better!

..

Also, we won some multimonitors new capabilities in both 2d and 3d. Basically, you can now decide if you want sticky edges between your monitors or not[1], and decide if you want one launcher (which is then set on your primary monitor), or a launcher on each monitor. Gnome Control Center was patched to add those default options (which only appears on an unity session) back to the main experience. You will now notice as well a more "unityish" preview with a panel and a launcher displayed. Dragging the launcher also enables to change where you want to set it in addition to the combobox (think about clicking on apply to get the choice taken into account!).

[elvis]

Throwing Precise on my crappy old Acer Pentium M 1.5GHz laptop today, I decided to update my home PXE boot system.

1) vesamenu.c32 is still broken, and causes hard lockups. Myself and about a squintillion others have been reporting this bug as far back as 11.04. Disappointing. So I grabbed the file out of the 10.04LTS build, and it worked fine. I don't know if I can be stuffed reporting it yet again, just to be ignored yet again. I remember last time the only way I found it was trying to PXE boot a virtual machine, which printed the error to the screen when the guest locked up. On bare metal, you merely get a frozen system, which is impossible to diagnose.

2) Precise 32-bit only offers a PAE kernel (not compatible with my CPU). Why??? Surely people on 4GB+ systems have all moved on to 64bit by now? Isn't the whole point of Linux that it doesn't discriminate against folks on old hardware? Again, pretty disappointing for an LTS release to do this. Multiple bugs have been filed on launchpad, but have all been snuffed saying that it was a design decision, not a bug.

Thankfully the Lubuntu team have stepped in and offered a non-PAE boot chain on their 32bit build. Clearly someone is thinking about users on older hardware. Grabbing the latest Lubuntu nightly alternate ISO, it had the kernel and initrd.gz I needed, and the install proceeds as expected now.

TL;DR - If you're on old hardware, use Lubuntu.

[HyRax1]

Originally Posted by elvis

1) vesamenu.c32 is still broken, and causes hard lockups.

Didn't know this was broken - haven't actually tried building a 12.04 PXE server (or anything later than 10.04 actually). Might do a test build tonight and see if I can reproduce your problem. I did notice that setting up 12.04 as a Live CD booted from PXE (a 10.04 box in this case) didn't seem to work until recently too.

Originally Posted by elvis

2) Precise 32-bit only offers a PAE kernel (not compatible with my CPU). Why??? Surely people on 4GB+ systems have all moved on to 64bit by now? Isn't the whole point of Linux that it doesn't discriminate against folks on old hardware? Again, pretty disappointing for an LTS release to do this. Multiple bugs have been filed on launchpad, but have all been snuffed saying that it was a design decision, not a bug.

I do remember reading something about this some months ago - something about moving forward and letting other distros take up the slack of supporting older systems because the kernel is getting too big or something like that to support everything. Even Ubuntu now offer the 64-bit version as the "default" download.

While I agree with this in principle, it does mean older machines are left in a lurch, however you can run 64-bit on a lot of older CPU's including the socket 775 (I think? I forget my socket standards) Pentium 4 so I don't think too many people will get caught out.

[antipody]

Does anyone run Docky in Gnome 3?

I like Docky on my natty tablet desktop. I particularly like the transition from docked to undocked mode.

In docked mode I use Docky on the main monitor and Gnome 3 panel on the lower monitor. This is a printscrn of docked mode.


Click to view full size!

In tablet or laptop mode Docky automatically switches to the lower monitor.

Does anyone know if it is possible to replicate this in Gnome 3's panel?

[IKT]

Originally Posted by toXin

My understanding of the structure of most distro's isn't huge, but Unity is a desktop environment and compiz is a plugin that manipulates these desktop environments, no?

yes.

Originally Posted by toXin

The compiz tool that I suggested to trasher is just to configure and tweak compiz plugins that are already there in an easy GUI application, hence why I wonder why it wasn't there by default.

It's not there by default because it has the ability to completely ruin unity, like one bad change and you're stuck on the command line with no way to recover, there was a big discussion about removing it entirely from the repo's:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/s...-ubuntu-repos/

Originally Posted by BAK

I could be mistaken, but isn't Ubuntu dropping Compiz in favour of Unity? This could be why it's not included by default.

Unity uses Compiz, there are no plans to drop it, they are looking at moving from X to Wayland though

Originally Posted by elvis

2) Precise 32-bit only offers a PAE kernel (not compatible with my CPU). Why???

There is a thread here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1938684
and bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ux/+bug/930447

12.04 is the last release that will support non-PAE. The default (and boot) kernel for 12.04 32 bit is now the PAE kernel, so there is no easy way to install a non-PAE kernel.

As far as I can see you're pretty much right, need to install xubuntu/lubuntu on older machines, I would like to know why they switched to a pae kernel by default.

[Menthu_Rae]

I have been testing 12.04 on my laptop over the past few days and I have to say that the choice of desktop environments is between rubbish and rubbisher (these are not the words I really want to use ).

GNOME3 - like, what the hell? How do I get info about my network adapter? How do I use extensions if the ones that worked a few weeks ago are now marked as incompatible due to a (slight?) version change?

Unity - How do I theme it and not have file-open dialogue boxes and certain other applications not look terrible? Unity is at least usable-ish to me... I however ask what the f**k the devs were thinking with Rhythmbox's default behaviour...

Launch Rhythmbox... control it via main window or via the sound menu... OK had enough of listening to music - (try to) close rhyhthmbox using "X" button... it minimises it... errr OK, should I be closing it from sound menu??? BABOW, not possible... how to actually close it??? CTRL+W... wut wut wut wut wut???

Everything - Give me back my global daylight map and a weather applet that works! The developer is wanting someone to help port the old indicator-datetime to Unity at least... but that is kind of beyond my skill level (at the moment)

Also Ubuntu decided it would go and install (sneakily) the nvidia drivers on my system (without me asking - just when I did normal updates). This had the effect of breaking everything and giving me only a TTY to work with... serious rage was had fixing that last night.

On this matter - I don't know if it's just my laptop's default Intel GPU or what (i5 480m) but the whole UI is very laggy and unresponsive when compared with 11.04.

Overall I am not really impressed but I am hoping (praying, seriously praying) that as more people move on to GNOME3 and/or Unity that they get some polish and reconfigurability and the ability to actually be functional and look "pretty" once again.

I am yet to look into that Cinnamon desktop thing but I am wondering whether that might be more up my alley...

[elvis]

Originally Posted by IKT

As far as I can see you're pretty much right, need to install xubuntu/lubuntu on older machines, I would like to know why they switched to a pae kernel by default.

I'm guessing they're going to claim >4GB installs as the reason. But again, I think it's safe to assume those folks are running 64bit hardware.

I would have hoped Canonical/Ubuntu would have an eye on older hardware, particularly given where it comes from in the world. I used to work with an ex-pat African who would travel back to his continent of birth every few years to do charity work around IT. Most of that revolved around the African second hand PC market, which was mostly very old (pentium II and III class) hardware cobbled together to make makeshift networks, often using wireless meshes to get out to the Internet. As a fairly common thing in central and north Africa, all of these sorts of users are going to suffer with non-PAE hardware.

Fair enough dumping i386 for i686. That's a move I can understand right now. But forcing a PAE kernel for 32bit builds could have waited one more LTS cycle.

[chip]

I think they've given up on low-end gear, leaving them to projects like Xubuntu/Lubuntu.

[elvis]

I guess to be fair, you can still get 12.04 on older hardware than Windows 7.

[toXin]

My system is slowly degrading and I haven't been bothered to look into it. Ever since I've started updating it's been breaking more and more. Applications randomly crash, hitting relaunch simply locks the error dialog box and does nothing :P.

Frequently when I turn my machine on from a suspended state, it will instantly suspend again in a few seconds (usually while typing my password), so then I have to hit the power button again. Also I'm unsure if this is hardware or software related, but if I don't touch anything for 30 or so seconds it's as if the HDD spins down and then as soon as I start doing something it makes a small click and spins back up. The HDD spin up would be a lot less noticeable on a desktop system so if any of you are running this on a laptop I'd like to know if you have had any similar sort of issues.

Also I see now what IKT meant by breaking Unity with CCSM, I decided to change a few things and unity was no longer working after reboot, though after rebooting again it reset to default settings and is now working again.I'm pretty disappointed about that, as all I did was add more workspaces O_o.

Anyway I've had my fun with this, but I think I'll be installing Arch sometime on the weekend when I have the time and energy.

[Menthu_Rae]

Originally Posted by toXin

Also I'm unsure if this is hardware or software related, but if I don't touch anything for 30 or so seconds it's as if the HDD spins down and then as soon as I start doing something it makes a small click and spins back up. The HDD spin up would be a lot less noticeable on a desktop system so if any of you are running this on a laptop I'd like to know if you have had any similar sort of issues. .

With the HDD clicking, edit the HDPARM settings.

http://www.havetheknowhow.com/Config...le-drives.html

You want to change it to 255 though which will keep the drive always spinning.

[elvis]

So Lubuntu 12.04 is on the old Acer Travelmate 290 (Celeron 1.5GHz with 512MB RAM) clunker laptop now. The plan was to move to Lubuntu anyway, so no dramas there.

It was previously running 10.04LTS with the Netbook Edition interface. All attempts at installing any version after that failed, and 12.04LTS has been the first successful install on it since then.

Speed wise it's either the same or faster depending on what I'm doing. There's still a few things about Lubuntu/LXDE that piss me off - not being able to disable tapping the trackpad as a mouseclick for instance is a pet peeve of mine. Also I can't figure out how I unmount GVFS file systems once they're mounted in the file manager. Not that I typically use the file manager (rsync over SSH for most things), but that's the sort of thing desktop users are going to find annoying. And to be really picky, the screensaver unlock dialogue box is ugly as hell.

But other than those minor niggles, all is well in crappy hardware land. Thank you open source for giving me new shiny things to play with, and making them faster than your previous release. I will continue to use my ancient shitty hardware for another few years yet.

[stmok]

On Old Hardware, Think Twice About Ubuntu 12.04
=> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA3ODQ

For anyone that still is running such vintage hardware in a production capacity, I would advise against upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or any other newer Linux distribution for that matter, aside from possibly those distributions catered towards running on crippled hardware. For Pentium M era hardware, I'm finding Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" to be the sweet spot, and for those with old hardware, you can always selectively upgrade your packages from there. Legacy hardware users would find a better Linux desktop experience if they went with this approach.

[daehenoc]

Originally Posted by toXin

Frequently when I turn my machine on from a suspended state, it will instantly suspend again in a few seconds (usually while typing my password), so then I have to hit the power button again. Also I'm unsure if this is hardware or software related, but if I don't touch anything for 30 or so seconds it's as if the HDD spins down and then as soon as I start doing something it makes a small click and spins back up. The HDD spin up would be a lot less noticeable on a desktop system so if any of you are running this on a laptop I'd like to know if you have had any similar sort of issues.

Have you run a memtest? First place to start, check for dodgy RAM And let it run for a few cycles, not just one like I usually do

Is anyone here running on Intel Macintosh hardware? I've just put a 60Gb SSD into a 17" 2008 (?) MacBook Pro and have done a vanilla install of 11.10 on it, but since we're so close to 12.04, I'm considering just waiting until 12.04 is released and using that. I could start using the pre-release version, I suppose, but the ...+mac.iso is ... questionable