Ubuntu 9.10 has been released

[just brew it!]

I've decided to do a normal CD install this time around; I'll save experimenting with the network-based install for when I'm not reinstalling my primary desktop.

Going dark here in 3... 2... 1... (well OK I could still post from my file server or my Windows box... heh).

[just brew it!]

Posting from the file server... (so much for going dark).

I've hit five annoyances so far, but in all fairness only three of them attributable to Ubuntu, and two of those was relatively minor:

1. At some point I moved my DVD drive to the 5th SATA port on my motherboard. Apparently the BIOS only allows you to boot from ports 1-4; if you try to boot from a CD attached to SATA port 5 the system hangs.

2. (Discovered as a result of #1) -- The reset button on the front panel of my case doesn't work?!?? I guess it is a testament to how stable this system has been (under Ubuntu 8.10/9.04) that I haven't noticed that the reset button was mis-wired in nearly a year.

3. If you have displays attached to both ports on a dual-head nVidia card during system installation, the Ubuntu installer bombs. I disconnected the secondary display, and the installer seems to be happy now.

4. (Minor) -- On the time zone selection map that the installer brings up, you can't click on Chicago. You can select it from the drop-down list, but for some reason there is no way to select it on the map, even if you click directly on where it is located.

5. (Minor) -- Why does it need to download language packs as part of the basic installation? At least there was a cancel button for this step. Either include them on the CD, or give the user the option of installing them after installation is complete; don't just start the download by default as part of the installation.

It is nearly done installing now.

[just brew it!]

OK, I'm running on the new 9.10 install now. So far, so good.

Gonna power off and reconnect the second monitor, and the other hard drives. (Yes, call me paranoid, but when doing a fresh OS install I always disconnect all hard drives other than the one I am installing to...)

[wibeasley]

It sounds like you're using the full installation version, instead of the alternate installation disk. Was that decision arbitrary, or is there a reason why you prefer it? (I'm interested in anybody else's opinion as well.)

[just brew it!]

It sounds like you're using the full installation version, instead of the alternate installation disk. Was that decision arbitrary, or is there a reason why you prefer it? (I'm interested in anybody else's opinion as well.)

Inertia. I've used the full installation more often in the past, so it is more "familiar". I haven't had a pressing need (yet) to deviate from the installation options in the full installer; it is easy enough to customize things after the fact. Notfred will probably disagree, he seems to be a bit of a CLI purist. Not that there is anything wrong with that; it is just a different (and in some situations better) way of approaching things.

The dual-head crash issue persisted after booting into the installed OS. Installing the proprietary nVidia drivers seems to have fixed it. So a caveat to dual-head nVidia users: disconnect your secondary display until you've installed the nVidia drivers!

Edit: Oh, and shutdowns are near-instantaneous for me -- less than 5 seconds. We'll see if that continues to be the case once I've set it up to mount all of the network shares, etc...

Edit 2: Regarding the "full install" issue... I do tend to use the Xubuntu variant on systems where I don't plan on using the desktop much, since Xfce is less bloated than GNOME. But so far, I have not used the alternate or server variants much...

[notfred]

Inertia. I've used the full installation more often in the past, so it is more "familiar". I haven't had a pressing need (yet) to deviate from the installation options in the full installer; it is easy enough to customize things after the fact. Notfred will probably disagree, he seems to be a bit of a CLI purist. Not that there is anything wrong with that; it is just a different (and in some situations better) way of approaching things.

In actual fact I end up just selecting the standard Ubuntu Desktop (or for the kids machine- Edubuntu Desktop) and then add on anything I wan after the fact.

It's just that I find needing to download the whole lot, burn it to a CD and then wait for CD-ROM to read everything back in to be too slow. I grab the minimum I need to boot and do a network install. As I'm already setup for network boot on my server and some of my motherboards don't do USB boot reliably, I go with what is easiest. With 3 Ubuntu machines in the house, I've setup apt-mirror and a network install running over a GigE LAN from WD 640GB Black drive is insanely fast!

[End User]

OK, I'm running on the new 9.10 install now. So far, so good.

Gonna power off and reconnect the second monitor, and the other hard drives. (Yes, call me paranoid, but when doing a fresh OS install I always disconnect all hard drives other than the one I am installing to...)

I'm curious to hear how well your multiple monitor setup works. Keep us posted.

[just brew it!]

In actual fact I end up just selecting the standard Ubuntu Desktop (or for the kids machine- Edubuntu Desktop) and then add on anything I wan after the fact.

It's just that I find needing to download the whole lot, burn it to a CD and then wait for CD-ROM to read everything back in to be too slow. I grab the minimum I need to boot and do a network install. As I'm already setup for network boot on my server and some of my motherboards don't do USB boot reliably, I go with what is easiest. With 3 Ubuntu machines in the house, I've setup apt-mirror and a network install running over a GigE LAN from WD 640GB Black drive is insanely fast!

Yeah, the main issue was that I wasn't already set up for network boot. I messed around with that in the past (diskless network boot F@h nodes), but I've been out of that loop for a few years. The system I had set up as a LTSP/TFTP boot server was retired a while back (the motherboard got re-used in a system upgrade for my brother's PC...)

Changing the subject -- anyone else got any feedback on the stability of compiz in this release? I'd disabled it previously, due to various random annoyances; I also see that 9.10 (like the past few releases) enables it by default. I guess I will leave it enabled unless/until it pisses me off.

[just brew it!]

OK, I'm running on the new 9.10 install now. So far, so good.

Gonna power off and reconnect the second monitor, and the other hard drives. (Yes, call me paranoid, but when doing a fresh OS install I always disconnect all hard drives other than the one I am installing to...)

I'm curious to hear how well your multiple monitor setup works. Keep us posted.

After installing the nVidia drivers, it looks good (so far).

But before installing the nVidia drivers, it was a train wreck (GUI desktop wouldn't even start if the second monitor was connected).

So I guess it is a "good news, bad news" sort of scenario.

[bthylafh]

Heh, I ran into the multi-monitor problem on my work Macbook (i945G IGP). It defaulted to using display cloning, but when I tried to have it do extended desktop with both the internal display & the monitor at full res, it went black and froze. Took the magic SysRq key combinations to force a reboot.

I'm still annoyed that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work by default.

edit: this was from the live CD, not an installed copy.

[just brew it!]

Audio is wonky. Volume seems to be a fraction of what it was before, even with all of the volume sliders maxed out. I have to turn the volume knob on my speakers all the way up to hear anything... still investigating.

[UberGerbil]

Audio is wonky. Volume seems to be a fraction of what it was before, even with all of the volume sliders maxed out. I have to turn the volume knob on my speakers all the way up to hear anything... still investigating.

Hope you don't suddenly get it fixed with everything max'd, or you might just jump out of your skin.

[thecoldanddarkone]

Audio is wonky. Volume seems to be a fraction of what it was before, even with all of the volume sliders maxed out. I have to turn the volume knob on my speakers all the way up to hear anything... still investigating.

Hope you don't suddenly get it fixed with everything max'd, or you might just jump out of your skin.

I've had that happen before. lol. I might try and install this one, I'm still on the fence on whether I want to actually install another 9.10.

[notfred]

I'm still annoyed that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work by default.

Yup, it's very useful to attempt recovery if futzing around with X.
See http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-enable- ... aunty.html

[just brew it!]

Audio is wonky. Volume seems to be a fraction of what it was before, even with all of the volume sliders maxed out. I have to turn the volume knob on my speakers all the way up to hear anything... still investigating.

Hope you don't suddenly get it fixed with everything max'd, or you might just jump out of your skin.

Well, it seems that only the onboard is being stupid; if I route things to my M-Audio Revolution card the volume is normal.

I guess the upside is that it seems to be recognizing (and controlling) both of them out of the box, which is better than before. Now I just need to figure out why the volume on the onboard is so low.

Edit: OK, I think I've got it figured out. For some reason, 9.10 wants to use the center/sub jack of my onboard audio as the primary output. If I plug my speakers into the center/sub jack instead of the front out jack, things seem to work properly...

[End User]

The G5 has been retired and the Ubuntu box is up and running. Everything is looking good. I have surround audio (S/PDIF) and dual displays (via the Nvidia 190.42 drivers ). My core apps are as follows:

Chromium
Thunderbird (with the Lightning plugin)
Songbird
Handbrake
VLC
gPodder
OpenOffice
Empathy
Skype
Google Earth
GIMP
F-Spot
RawTherapee
Xarchiver
Remote Desktop Viewer
Terminal Server Client
CompizConfig - the ability to duplicate Expose was icing on the cake for this transition


Two major issues so far:

1) the xorg.conf file was locked so my dual display config was not being saved. I had to run a terminal command to unlock it (gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf)
2) Suspend is a crap shoot. Not a deal breaker but I miss how reliable my G5 was in this regard. The investigation continues.

Overall I am extremely pleased with 9.10.

[just brew it!]

1) the xorg.conf file was locked so my dual display config was not being saved. I had to run a terminal command to unlock it (gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Yeah, this seems to be a problem in nVidia's control panel. It assumes it is running as root (doesn't attempt to elevate if you run as a normal user), so the file permissions prevent the settings from getting saved. The solution is to invoke it with the command:
gksudo nvidia-settings

[End User]

1) the xorg.conf file was locked so my dual display config was not being saved. I had to run a terminal command to unlock it (gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Yeah, this seems to be a problem in nVidia's control panel. It assumes it is running as root (doesn't attempt to elevate if you run as a normal user), so the file permissions prevent the settings from getting saved. The solution is to invoke it with the command:
gksudo nvidia-settings

Most excellent! Thanks!

[etilena]

Finally managed to get it installed on my Eee PC. Had to do it twice cause the first time I tried to be smart and leave my /home folder intact and some of the settings didn't work right out of the box. The Clutter interface for netbooks was borked as Ubuntu got confused with what it should be and gave me regular applications in the taskbar without the minimize, maximize and close buttons. So I went about installing it again.

Was a bit annoyed I couldn't use multi touch on my trackpad but that was easily fixed with the mouse settings.

Some questions though, how does one edit Grub 2 to reduce to startup selection time to choose between OSes? I googled and it says not to edit the grub.cfg file.

No benchmarks, but overall it feels much snappier than 9.04. It used to lag browsing with Firefox but that seems to have gnoe away. I'm running it off an SD card, so performance is pretty amazing for me. The UNR makes better use of screen real estate. Battery life seems to be reported as worse off though. Startup time has gone a little backwards for me. Other than that, quite happy with it right now.

[grantmeaname]

Some questions though, how does one edit Grub 2 to reduce to startup selection time to choose between OSes? I googled and it says not to edit the grub.cfg file.

Ubuntu uses a file called menu.lst instead of grub.cfg, so look for a guide to editing that.

[srg86]

It's definatly been a bumpier ride for me than with other Ubuntu versions though now I've got it installed, it's pretty smooth and it does feel snappier than previous versions.

When I first tried to run the Live CD, I got the same problem as JBI, total blank, X had totally crashed. Only way to get it to boot was to disconnect my second monitor.

The live CD detected both my hard disks fine, but the Installer simply refused to detect my primay OS drive, no matter what I did. In the end I've installed it using the Alternative CD as that was the only way.

I've got it up and running but getting Kernel Crash reports, (the explanation mark icon in the top right hand corner). I've seen that it is a high prioity bug on launchpad so I'm hoping it will be fixed soon. Something about ECC errors, even though my RAM isn't ECC. Still it doesn't affect my usage so I can just ignore it.

After installing the nvidia drivers, dual monitors works fine, but I'm having trouble saving the change to get the second monitor running, even if I run it in gksudo, it still fails to pass the file.

Other than that, it's great!

BTW It appears I'm not the only one not to have a smooth ride:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03 ... ustration/

[just brew it!]

Some questions though, how does one edit Grub 2 to reduce to startup selection time to choose between OSes? I googled and it says not to edit the grub.cfg file.

Ubuntu uses a file called menu.lst instead of grub.cfg, so look for a guide to editing that.

Not any more. With 9.10 Ubuntu has switched from GRUB 1.x to GRUB 2.x. As I noted the other day to a co-worker, "Everything I know about GRUB is wrong now".

Try editing the GRUB_TIMEOUT line in /etc/default/grub, then run update-grub (both as root).

[srg86]

"Everything I know about GRUB is wrong now".

I definatly feel your pain, I use grub for my own projects and with GRUB 2, eventhing I know about it is wrong as well, I'm hoping I can use the grub config to setup other systems. The config file for grub 2 seems far more complicated!

[just brew it!]

It is actually kind of amusing that they chose to switch now. Just last month I had to dive into GRUB 1.x internals for a project at work (we needed to modify it for an embedded device, so I was messing around with the stage 2 loader at the source code level). So that's yet another piece of useless, obsolete knowledge I've got knocking around in the back of my brain...

[etilena]

Some questions though, how does one edit Grub 2 to reduce to startup selection time to choose between OSes? I googled and it says not to edit the grub.cfg file.

Ubuntu uses a file called menu.lst instead of grub.cfg, so look for a guide to editing that.

Not any more. With 9.10 Ubuntu has switched from GRUB 1.x to GRUB 2.x. As I noted the other day to a co-worker, "Everything I know about GRUB is wrong now".

Try editing the GRUB_TIMEOUT line in /etc/default/grub, then run update-grub (both as root).

Yeap, did a further check last night and just edited the grub.cfg file in nano anyway. update-grub, and it was good to go. have to say that grub 2 was smart enough (or was it the ubuntu installer?) to put in the settings for booting my win xp partition on the main ssd. previously with grub 1, it had detected the windows partition, but would not load windows as it switched from the sd card to the main ssd and I had to do a complicated remapping of partitions before it booted windows.