

Hands-on: Ubuntu goes social, gains Me Menu in 10.04 alpha 3 - ashishbharthi
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2010/03/hands-on-ubuntu-goes-social-gains-me-menu-in-1004-alpha-3.ars?utm_source=microblogging&utm_medium=arstch&utm_term=Main%20Account&utm_campaign=microblogging

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jamesbritt
Holy fuck I wish they would just stop dicking with the damn thing.

No, do not want more and more stuff added to this or that. I would really like
it if things would Just Work on more and more hardware, especially more recent
hardware.

Fix the stuff that doesn't work quite right, and leave the rest alone. Let
users add the bling they want later on.

It's like they're in some battle with Microsoft to see who can add the most
superficial crap that gets in the way of just doing stuff.

~~~
code0
We should be glad that open source (Linux/Ubuntu) works when it does. Its such
a curious case that its expected of Linux to support all myriad kinds of
hardware systems. Its the responsibility of the hardware vendor to provide the
drivers, not the hackers who labor hard to reverse engineer the specs when the
vendors even refuses to publish how the hardware works. Few vendors really
care about Linux. On the other hand, Windows has it really easy. Before the
release of a new version, vendors work their asses off with Microsoft to
ensure that before the OS reaches market, their drivers are already up to
date. Apple has to care about only one piece of hardware which is manufactured
by them (leaving peripherals of course). We should be just glad that it works
when it does. Those who work to make it work, work hard. Disclaimer: On my
Lenovo laptop, today, every single device works now on Ubuntu 9.04 from the
card reader to webcam. It didn't always.

~~~
jamesbritt
"We should be glad that open source (Linux/Ubuntu) works when it does. Its
such a curious case that its expected of Linux to support all myriad kinds of
hardware systems."

It really is impressive that things work as well as they do, but OTOH, if
Ubuntu is really going to be "desktop ready" then it has to support modern
hardware.

I attempted an install of Ubuntu 9.10 on an HP box with a Dell LCD monitor and
an nVidia graphics card, and though it started out OK, the screen eventually
went black. Turns out there was no workable default video driver in place to
allow even crude graphics. Even the text/low-res installation options failed.

I did finally get it running (assorted usage of virtual terminals and ftp'ing
of driver), but hibernation and suspend still don't work. And gnome-terminal
has acquired some bug where it never warns you if you're closing multiple
tabs.

Maybe this is an apples-and-oranges deal, but when I read of new gee-whiz crap
like twitter integration in the task bar, while core behavior such as
hibernation is still a crapshoot, and key apps are buggy, it makes me wonder
where the priorities are.

Perhaps I'm just bitter about KDE3 being dropped for the saccharine mess that
is KDE4. :(

Bottom line seems to be that OSS developers, by and large, hate working on the
mundane stuff, and much prefer to invent Really Cool Stuff, regardless of any
real need for it.

Shouldn't bitch about stuff that's free, but I'd like to think the people
calling the shots care if the end results are properly usable.

The Magic 8 ball is telling me "Xmonad looking REALLY good". :)

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gibsonf1
For those of you that don't have Ubuntu natively installed on your computer
(such as myself) there is a great answer to this problem: VirtualBox
<http://www.virtualbox.org/> . I installed it recently on my XP laptop, and
now enjoy Ubuntu in what seems to be native speed. In fact, my dev environment
of slime/emacs sbcl is runing radically faster than lispworks slime/emacs in
xp. I have a dual screen setup, so I have Ubuntu in full screen mode (you can
switch out with ctrl f) in one monitor, and xp in the other. Life is good.

~~~
dpritchett
I too am enjoying VirtualBox as a way of setting up discrete development
environments. I've got one for PHP, one for Rails, and a general Ubuntu box
for anything else I want to try out (e.g. Clojure).

I documented my personal "get Ubuntu running via VirtualBox on XP" experience
here: [http://www.sharingatwork.com/2009/10/get-started-building-
we...](http://www.sharingatwork.com/2009/10/get-started-building-web-apps-
with-your-own-ruby-on-rails-virtual-development-server/)

~~~
gibsonf1
That's really nice having an image with the Rails environment installed. Maybe
I should do the same for slime/emacs/sbcl? (I'm not sure what the demand would
be)

~~~
WalterGR
I've been working (very slowly) on a VMWare VM tailored for Lisp hacking. I
posted to

[http://www.lispforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=588](http://www.lispforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=588)

to gauge demand. It didn't seem like there's much.

I still plan on eventually "completing" it, but at the moment I'm sick of
trying to get Emacs to behave in some small ways like other editors.

