
Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate - Uncle_Sam
http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.10/
======
mgunes
The RC has not actually been released. Various news sites are reporting it
prematurely to get extra traffic as usual, and the Ubuntu Release Team would
like people to wait [1] for the official release announcement, which will be
posted to the release blog [2] , and the ubuntu-announce mailing list [3].

[1] [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/ubuntu-10-10-release-
cand...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/ubuntu-10-10-release-candidate-
available-for-download/#comment-82347882)

[2] <http://release-blog.ubuntu.com>

[3] <https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce>

~~~
illumen
It has now :)

------
mseebach
Slightly more relevant link:
[http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta#New%20features%2...](http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta#New%20features%20in%20Maverick)

~~~
mgunes
That's slightly outdated, as it's the beta page.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/TechnicalOverview> reflects the
latest state of things.

------
sandGorgon
On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so
much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are
broken, but not fixed.

Bug 568711
([https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711\)is)
particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a
lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity
and is currently unassigned.

~~~
moxiemk1
It seems highly improbably that the people working on fonts and design would
otherwise be working on suspend/resume.

Medium severity sounds right for a bug that only affects users with certain
hardware. High severity should be reserved for things with a wider impact, or
else it loses its meaning.

~~~
lg
fwiw, all these laptop issues (especially this suspend/resume bug after I
upgraded to Hardy) were what convinced me to get a mac. The only people I know
with problem-free linux systems are desktop users.

~~~
bad_user
That's not true.

I have a one year old Dell Inspiron 1525 with Ubuntu.

Not the best laptop ever but at least since Ubuntu 9.10 ... 3D graphics worked
out of the box (open-source, Intel), Wifi worked out of the box (not so on
OpenSuse or Debian), the built-in webcam worked out of the box, practically
everything is up and running as soon as you install Ubuntu, no extra
configuration required.

Not only that, but I also got an external 3G modem from Vodafone, that also
worked out of the box.

As I've said before ... there are plenty of configurations that are running
just fine with Ubuntu, but if you're going to shop at random of course you're
going to have problems. Heck ... my external 3G modem wasn't compatible with
Vista out of the box, you had to search for an updated driver on the Internet.

~~~
dkarl
Apparently some people have laptops that worked great with earlier Ubuntu
releases but don't work after an upgrade. That's scary to me -- I could do
careful research and buy a laptop now, only to have an upgrade make my laptop
unusable. Then at the very best I'd have to downgrade and be stuck on an
earlier version of Ubuntu while they classify it as a medium-priority bug and
leave it broken in subsequent releases.

P.S. To make this more specific, I've been thinking about buying a refurbished
Thinkpad, and one of the commenters on the bug says suspend/resume stopped
working on his T61p in Lucid and remains broken in Maverick.

~~~
jscn
I've had similar issues with Ubuntu upgrades in the past. I went to Debian
(stable) instead, figuring the longer upgrade cycles would mean fewer
problems. That was all well and good until I needed to enable backports to
upgrade Firefox to >=3.5 for work. Now the package manager's broken due to
some weird dependency issues.

I don't understand why there is no free software equivalent of Apple, selling
(laptop) hardware and maintaining a GNU/Linux distro that's guaranteed to work
on it. Surely there's a buck or two to made?

~~~
dkarl
There are a couple such companies, I think. One is called Emperor Linux (if
it's still in business) and offered reasonably late-model Vaio laptops among
others.

~~~
blasdel
And to my knowledge none of them do direct distro maintenance to keep the
laptops they've sold supported -- they just resell OEM (Sager-style) laptops
that they spec conservatively so that all the hardware is supported when sold.

------
someone_here
This release uses a new interface font, which is the first major OS (that I
know of, anyways) to not use a Helvetica-like font for their GUI. Mark
Shuttleworth talks about the decision and impact on his blog:
<http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/537>

~~~
retube
screenshots: [http://www.webupd8.org/2010/09/ubuntu-1010-maverick-
meerkat-...](http://www.webupd8.org/2010/09/ubuntu-1010-maverick-meerkat-beta-
has.html)

~~~
cpach
Oh, nice to see a light, pale theme, like in Mac OS. It's much easier on the
eyes, at least for me.

~~~
nailer
Anybody else think this is the first ever professional looking Linux distro
they've ever seen?

Congrats to the Ubuntu team.

~~~
dkarl
You must be a graphic designer :-) I thought, "What does attractive have to do
with professional?" and then realized you meant designed _by_ professionals,
not designed _for_ professionals. Professionals' tools tend to look beautiful
to them and ugly to everyone else. Maybe this is a step toward changing that,
at least for Linux. (Except I'll still have emacs taking up at least half my
screen space, with its functional but butt-ugly syntax colorization....)

~~~
nailer
Nope, I'm a programmer. I just don't like brightly colored notification icons
all over my GNOME taskbar. They're distracting - looks (and discoverability,
and other UI aspects) directly affect usability, I'm surprised you say you
don't get that.

As a counterpoint to your argument, I'd say OS X has more professional UI
designers than Windows or the Linux OSs and is generally regarded as being
more usable too.

~~~
dkarl
_I'm surprised you say you don't get that._

Thanks for reading my comment so charitably ;-)

What I'm saying is that beauty to the professional user and beauty to an
innocent bystander are different things. A professional actually cares _more_
about usability and certainly cares about aesthetics as they apply to
usability. The way a professional perceives a desktop will be very different
from the way a casual user does. But some people are self-conscious about
that; they don't want their professional exposure to change the way they
perceive things, or at least they don't want anybody else to notice. So they
want a plastic consumer case for their Hole Hawg[1].

Not that OS X doesn't have a lot going for it on the desktop, but a major part
of the appeal for developers is that they can have a great desktop they love
without non-geeks thinking they must be a little weird to love it.

[1] <http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html>

~~~
randallsquared
_but a major part of the appeal for developers is that they can have a great
desktop they love without non-geeks thinking they must be a little weird to
love it._

Most developers (and sysadmins) I know positively _delight_ in their
reputation of being a little weird. I know that given two options I like as
well otherwise, I'll usually pick the less common one. I still use OS X,
though, having switched from Gentoo in 2003, and having tried Ubuntu and Arch
for 6-7 months within the last year.

------
yason
This is the first time I haven't found a human-readable summary anywhere of
the new features and major changes of the upcoming Ubuntu version. They used
to have this but now their release pages just point to a list of ~250
blueprints which doesn't constitute a "human-readable summary".

Can someone help, please?

~~~
mgunes
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/TechnicalOverview>

------
makeramen
Their power management is the only thing keeping me away at this moment. Right
now Win7 is getting almost double the battery life on my laptop.

Ubuntu boot times are impeccable though.

------
olalonde
Is it possible to upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 without reinstalling the whole
OS?

~~~
Tichy
It should be? What gives you reason to think it isn't possible?

~~~
olalonde
Just asking since I've only been using Ubuntu for a few weeks.

------
metachris
I'm glad that the Maverick Meerkat EC2 images(1) are working great. In the
latest Lucid Lynx image (24.9.) as well as in the updates for the previous
ones they introduced a nasty bug(2) causing a phantom load of 100% on one CPU.
No fix in sight yet; this was really annoying. In my experiments so far,
Maverick Meerkat works just great!

[1] <http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/>

[2] <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/574910>

------
mohammedsk
I also gave up on Ubuntu. I had Dell D800 and Ubuntu was working just fine
including suspend/hibernate. Now I got a new ASUS, where suspend/hibernate
does not work. I decided to stick with Windows 7, it is more reliable for me
when it comes to that issue. Although, I miss Ubuntu, for me it is a much
better OS. Hopefully on day, before I am dead, they will fix this issue.

------
whyworryagain
Can I dual boot ubuntu on my mac? I am looking to get a mac to replace my
netbook.

~~~
stanleydrew
I am, but it hasn't been particularly great. There are some hardware issues,
mostly surrounding audio and multiple monitors, that I haven't experienced
when running Ubuntu on other machines.

~~~
xorglorb
Strange, Lucid works great without any problems on my Macbook Pro 6,2.

What model are you running?

------
weel
Works fine for me already.

------
u48998
I hate Ubuntu, there is no support for it. Tried it twice already. They need
to go back to the drawing board.

~~~
rfugger
An overview of support options, which are mainly free:

<http://www.ubuntu.com/support>

If you need live human support for a consumer desktop system, you can purchase
it on a yearly basis:

<http://www.canonical.com/consumer-services/support>

~~~
u48998
I wish to use Ubuntu because I have slightly older hardware, but if it renders
youtube video in slow motion and if I see tons of similar complaints on the
internet, than what good is an operating system competing with Microsoft which
isn't even working well right out of the box?

Everyone seems to be getting greedy for updated hardware and operating
systems. I don't really care to upgrade my hardware every two years. If Ubuntu
cannot deliver without fastest processor and video memory, than they might as
well just start selling to corporate and be done with the free stuff.

~~~
fader
Youtube is rendered by Flash. Entirely. As in, Ubuntu did not write the
software, has no control over it, and can't make it run any faster. Just like
Apple and Microsoft can't.

There are also slimmed down Ubuntu versions for older hardware, e.g. Xubuntu
and Lubuntu. Those run much faster on aging systems, allowing Ubuntu to
support people with newer hardware.

Not to mention that nobody's forcing you to update if you don't want to. For
example, 8.04 is still officially supported through April 2011 for desktops
and 2013 for servers. Please feel free to continue using that if it works
better for you.

------
tolini
Ok, my previous comment ("Who cares?") seemed to be thoughtless or even
offensive (~15 downvotes in 5 minutes), and I have to acknowledge that it
lacked quite some arguments.

So let me ask: why does this news deserve so much attention to stand in front
of HN? What interesting innovation, except the GUI, has brought this new OS
release? Is an OS all about GUI and look & feel?

Generally speaking, I am just fed up with all this thoughtless media
attention.

~~~
weego
"Is an OS all about GUI and look & feel?"

Considering 95% of the world don't care about anything but how something looks
and whether they can interact with it in a way that makes sense I would
suggest that it is, to a large degree.

They also need a good foundation of course but too often do people in the OSS
communities confuse having a solid foundation with having a winning product.

