It just makes the default Human and Clearlooks themes much more compact, so its a good way to get more screen space without going all XMonad-crazy ;)
Edit: Also, the "Esco" and "Metabox" window borders are good companions to this, as they are the most compact ones shipping be default (at least on 8.04)
Try unetbootin:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
I installed the new ubuntu on my 2GB USB flash drive in less than 15 minutes. Sure is handy when you don't want to burn a CD you know you are going to use less than 5 times :-). Plus it boots fast, unlike the sluggish livecd's. You can make your choice from about a two dozen distro's including LinuxMint (which I intend to try very soon), Fedora, Puppy, DamnSmallLinux and other great ones.
Hey, thanks for that! I don't have any CD-R's handy (and won't be able to get any till next week), so this was perfect. Once I figured out that the USB drive has to be formated as FAT32, I was solid.
I'm still not convinced the 2.6.27 kernel is stable enough. Our .27 test cluster (various distros including U8.10) has numerous issues that just ARENT fixed yet.
I always hate Ubuntu .10 releases :( even when they call it "stable" is usually isn;t and we see a huge increase in (client) issues...
I have to reluctantly agree with this statement. It shouldn't be that when I upgrade to 8.10 from 8.04 I am stuck fixing all of the issues that the upgrade itself broke (for example wireless is working poorly and is non-functional after suspends). While these issues are marginal and will only suck up a few minutes of my time, there are plenty of positives. Notably, GIMP, GNOME, and various other upgrades are quite nice.
I always felt guilty complaining about the stability of an Ubuntu distro. If I wanted stability I would stick with Debian or BSD. For free software of such quality, what I am gaining is certainly worth the time ensuring it works on my system.
I sympathise over the Wifi issue. Had many similar issues.
I always consider 8.10 of "cutting edge" quality and never bother to upgrade our day-to-day systems for a couple of months after release (sometimes we even wait till the next .04). As you say it's not worth the issue fixing headaches :P
I don't know how much things have improved with Ibex, but there are some (mostly resolvable) issues with 64bit on hardy.
You need to play around to find solutions for some bits of software you don't have the source to, e.g. flash plugin, ndiswrapper wifi drivers. Ubuntu forums are good for this.
The only unresolved 64bit issue I hit was that Java LiveConnect (accessing browser javascript from java applets) was broken in the 64-bit java available for Hardy. Haven't checked to see if it's fixed in Ibex yet.
(Hmm...I abbreviate Hardy Heron => Heron, but Intrepid Ibex => Ibex. I wonder why.)
Remember that pointers are the double size in a 64bit memory layout. Depending on their structure, your programs might consume more memory. But you get to break the memory limit of a single program and you get rid of some of the cruft in the x86 ISA.
I've had few problems with a 64 bit Ubuntu on an AMD64 Athlon. The most notable is 32bit video codecs and flash. Interestingly, you can play Homeworld 2 and Warcraft III fine in Wine even on 64 bit.
The primary is problem is not that we progressed to 64 bit. It is that some operating systems and programs are still 32 bit dependent.
"... Is there any harm in installing the 64bit version (ubuntu)? ..."
Are you upgrading or re-installing from another OS or is this a new system? Each of those have slight problems (bloat when upgrading, backup your data before you install). Aside from that the only problems I've had are existing commercial software like flash (32 bit probably never to be 64).
No 64bit but try http://wiki.ubuntu.com/FlashPlayer9 (Adobe Flash Player Non-free plugin installer) and more FOSS alternatives System->Administration->Synaptic & search for 'Flash'.
"... Was running Hardy 32bit ..."
You can keep your home partition or data if you want.
When I did a test upgrade on my slice a couple weeks ago ( same reasoning as yours :P ), I ended up with a lot of .sh scripts in my `rcconf` listings as things that would start up with the box. Any idea if you have those on your machine now, or if it was a fluke of upgrading back before the RC/final?
I'm going to hold off a bit before upgrading. What I run on my laptop, while having Ubuntu as a base, ends it's similarity to the Ubuntu defaults there. There's not much in this release that helps me out a bunch, may as well let some bugs / deficiencies work themselves up before upgrading the system.
I appear to be on the list of people for whom the upgrade will remove 3d acceleration. I'm going to have to wait. Does anyone know if this is purely an issue with kernel and drivers that should get resolved soon or if this is a strategic change in supporting the vendor drivers (Nvidia in my case)?
the new kernel change my /dev/hda to /dev/sda, which messed up my custom fstab entry. so it went to command prompt on startup to allow me to change it. fine apart from that.
Exactly. The Ubuntu releases are more incremental. Really all that the new releases contain are new and updated patches, occasionally a new kernel release, better support, occasionally additional applications, etc.
It's not like Windows where each release usually brings some serious changes.
Linux distribution releases are really about cat herding. With
* Gnome
* KDE
* The kernel
* Openoffice
* Firefox
* Mysql
* Postgresql
You're almost bound to release just before or just after someone else's "big release" and so either miss it and be a bit out of date, or include something that is perhaps not 100% stable.
You can set your update manager to only fetch security updates and install them in the background (and via a GUI, too!). They don't break anything and you won't get bugged.
Plus, many people have huge hard drives and making backups of the OS isn't hard. You can fix it of course, but why bother when can you do it faster restoring from a backup..
Having said this, Windows Update does find a new bloody error code every single time I run it and it never has a clue what the error code means.
So, perhaps, something better than that.
On the plus side, XP SP3 removes the option to have the IE address bar in the taskbar "for legal reasons" and the whole point of free software is to get away from that kind of junk. So maybe it's not all bad the apt-get your-hands-off-my-config-files way.
It rates packages by criticality during updates and hides the riskier ones by default. This is more important for Mint than Ubuntu proper, though, since Mint is a remix on top of the original packages and is more likely to break during a regular package update.
Kubuntu 8.04 kicks ass, but 8.10 sucks. Maybe its because of KDE 4, but i had a hard time setting up my keymaps,the new adept had random bugs in it, and i found it almost impossible to eject a CD!(i click eject and the cd ejects and GOES BACK IN!?!?!). On the other hand, since i switched back to 8.04 this morning, I've been missing folderview all day. KDE 4 has some good ideas in it, but needs more time to mature.
ps. I love kubuntu, but this time they screwed up seriously!
The CD issue is a known bug (read the release notes). The temporary fix (until an SRU can make it to the repos) is to press eject again before the CD is remounted, and then it won't pull itself back in again.
I am so far very happy with 8.10, too. Finally dual screen works out of the box, yay! Even flashplayer continued to work after the update, what more can one wish for?
I hate to sound negative, but this makes no freaking sense. Those two Intel cards have been pretty much the only safe choice for Linux laptop buyers: everything else, including Dell crap, doesn't work at all or requires using terrible hacks like ndiswrapper. The first thing I look for when getting a laptop, is to make sure the wireless card is one of those two. AND THEY DON'T WORK ANYMORE?!
To me this sounds like a distro with pretty much disabled WiFi.
Users affected by this issue can install the linux-backports-modules-intrepid package, to install a newer version of this driver that corrects the bug.
http://martin.ankerl.com/2008/05/13/human-compact-gnome-them...
It just makes the default Human and Clearlooks themes much more compact, so its a good way to get more screen space without going all XMonad-crazy ;)
Edit: Also, the "Esco" and "Metabox" window borders are good companions to this, as they are the most compact ones shipping be default (at least on 8.04)