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Thu Apr 17, 2014 8:58 pm

Launched some scripts before I left work today to download the ISOs for all of the flavors and mirror the repository. ISOs should all be there by morning; the mirror probably won't be ready until sometime over the weekend (it is ~135GB). The plan is to sneakernet a copy of everything home; once I've got the initial snapshot of the repository as a starting point my crappy DSL should be good enough to keep it synced up going forward.

I plan to play around with it in VMs this weekend if I can find the time.

I see that they've finally switched to a DVD image (instead of CD) for the desktop flavors. I guess this actually happened with the previous (13.10) release, which I skipped.

bthylafh · Thu Apr 17, 2014 9:22 pm

I don't passionately hate Unity any longer; now I merely dislike it.

Thu Apr 17, 2014 9:28 pm

bthylafh wrote:
I don't passionately hate Unity any longer; now I merely dislike it.

It has its place. My preference is actually for KDE these days, but Unity seems to run better on lower-spec machines as KDE is quite a resource pig. My laptop runs 12.04 with Unity, but my desktop is currently running Kubuntu 12.04. I may give the XFCE or LXDE flavor a go on the laptop this time around...

bthylafh · Thu Apr 17, 2014 10:01 pm

I see someone's packaged MATE 1.6 for 14.04. I'll have to give that a spin in VirtualBox.

Fri Apr 18, 2014 6:27 am

Kubuntu 14.04 is posted and ready as well. Plan to see if the older Lenovo I've got lying around can handle it before revamping the desktop machine.

MarkG509 · Mon Apr 21, 2014 12:39 am

I downloaded a Server image when it first came out, and cleared out a machine for it. But haven't had the time to install it yet. My main home desktop machine is running a native install of Mint 14 Mate, based on Ubuntu 12.10, which goes off service this month. Mint 17 is an LTS release based on 14.04, but is not due out until the end of May.

So, I'm considering doing a minimal server install of Ubuntu and finally/really doing *everything* in VMs.

Mon Apr 21, 2014 7:09 am

Didn't have time to play with it this weekend. But I've got the entire 14.04 repo mirrored now, which will streamline things quite a bit as I try things out and set up new systems. My file server upgrade (which was originally supposed to happen last fall) has also gotten delayed enough that I can use 14.04 Server for it now...

MarkG509 wrote:
So, I'm considering doing a minimal server install of Ubuntu and finally/really doing *everything* in VMs.

Unless you plan to use all of the VMs via remote desktop sessions, you'll need to install at least a minimal desktop environment on the server box. Doing it this way may be easier than installing one of the desktop variants then trying to figure out what you can toss; but a lightweight desktop variant like Lubuntu would probably make a reasonable starting point too.

Also keep in mind that 3D acceleration can be somewhat hit-or-miss in VMs, if that matters to you. If you need GPU hardware acceleration in multiple OSes, you'll want to multi-boot or have the boot drive in a drive dock for easy swapping.

MarkG509 · Mon Apr 21, 2014 11:42 pm

just brew it! wrote:
a lightweight desktop variant like Lubuntu would probably make a reasonable starting point too.

I've used LXDE before and liked it, though I prefer Mate (or any Gnome 2). But before I make any decisions, I'm going to try this in a VM. One issue I see already is that Mint packages-up some nice desktop applets that I like, e.g. the Mate Sensors Applet.

Then again, Mint 17 may well be out before I get enough time to play with this...

Tue Apr 22, 2014 9:12 pm

OK, just plonked a 4GB kit in the Lenovo T61 (C2D T8100, 2.1GHz, 6MB L2) and she's much happier compared to the 1GB that was in it when I got it for free. I have myself a semi-competent traveling lappy and spent all of $49 on it. Now to migrate daughter's laptop to K 14.04 LTS and try the new way of bodging Netflix onto a Linux lappy. Instead of an old WINEd version of Firefox, this method relies on Chrome and messing with user agent settings. The YT vid looked easy, but my tussle with printer drivers tells me it's never easy.

For those with Brother printers. The "driver" they offer on their support webpages really does work, even though it does require a small amount of CLI. I have no idea if it offends Open Source or not, all I know is that it works. K 14.04 installed and pretended to install the Brother networked printer. All it did was spit out blank pages until I turned it off (just like every other attempt to make K 12.04 play nice with the printer). Only thing that worked was the method offered by Brother.

bthylafh · Tue Apr 22, 2014 9:40 pm

I've gotten my host-based Brother DCP7065 to work with the Brother-supplied driver, including the scanner. I imagine that if I'd spent the extra to get a PostScript-compatible Brother that it'd Just Work without needing a manually-installed (print) driver. Linux is generally really good about supporting PS printers without hassle.

Glorious · Wed Apr 23, 2014 6:06 am

Captain Ned wrote:
Now to migrate daughter's laptop to K 14.04 LTS and try the new way of bodging Netflix onto a Linux lappy. Instead of an old WINEd version of Firefox, this method relies on Chrome and messing with user agent settings. The YT vid looked easy, but my tussle with printer drivers tells me it's never easy.

Actually pipelight is pretty easy. Honestly, the "hardest" part was the user-agent thing, which should tell you something.

If you've already installed chrome:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight        (there is some ncurses menu for the MS EULA at this point, just say yes).

Then do the user agent thing and it should just work. It did for me, albeit on 32-bits.

It's annoying if you are on x86-64, because it needs a whole bunch of 32-bit libraries, but I'd assume that it should still "just workTM"

:wink:

Wed Apr 23, 2014 6:22 am

Glorious wrote:
It's annoying if you are on x86-64, because it needs a whole bunch of 32-bit libraries, but I'd assume that it should still "just workTM"

On Ubuntu/Debian there's a pseudo-package which will pull in pretty much all of the 32-bit libraries for you in one go:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Wed Apr 23, 2014 9:04 am

32 bit here, as both lappys max out at 4GB. Was planning on 64-bit when the desktop gets converted. Waiting for Amazon to deliver a new external 3.5" for the backup drive dock as the WD Green in it somehow lunched itself while in cold storage.

captaintrav · Wed Apr 23, 2014 9:26 am

Just fired up the 14.04 Live CD. Open an application that isn't locked to the sidebar, and the icon for it shows up stacked in a pile of indecipherable crap at the bottom still.. Opened another couple of apps that aren't on the launcher, icons appear in random positions on the launcher. Yep, Unity is still an abortion of a UI.

captaintrav · Wed Apr 23, 2014 9:51 am

Oh, and I'm pretty sure most distros ship with a PAE enabled kernel, so you're not really gaining much by going 64bit in some cases, unless you have individual apps that gobble up large amounts of ram in a single instance. I had a box with 32 bit Ubuntu, 8GB of ram happily running a few VMs, some of which were 64 bit just fine. IIRC you get a little more usable RAM with 4gb, too, assuming you are stuck with a bodged BIOS.

captaintrav · Wed Apr 23, 2014 9:56 am

Glorious wrote:
It's annoying if you are on x86-64, because it needs a whole bunch of 32-bit libraries, but I'd assume that it should still "just workTM"

I much prefer 64 bit Linux to 64 bit Windows. Unless you are running software that's only available as 32 bit binaries, or stuff like Wine, that needs 32bitness for completeness. You don't need any 32 bit libraries at all. Windows is an insane mismash of 32 bit and 64 now, and many whole subsystems need to be duplicated either in whole or in part. It's no small feat Microsoft accomplished 64 bit without breaking backward compatibility with %90+ of everything besides device drivers and 16-bit apps, which is a hardware thing anyhow. I would love to see a version of Windows 9 or maybe 10 remove 32 bit subsystems by default, or at least make them optional. I believe that the basic Windows install for x64 takes up something like 2-4Gb more right out of the box, which should be trivial, but not on SSDs or even moreso on tablets with fixed storage limits.

Glorious · Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:11 am

captaintrav wrote:
Oh, and I'm pretty sure most distros ship with a PAE enabled kernel, so you're not really gaining much by going 64bit in some cases, unless you have individual apps that gobble up large amounts of ram in a single instance. I had a box with 32 bit Ubuntu, 8GB of ram happily running a few VMs, some of which were 64 bit just fine.

Yeah, the reason that was never really an option for windows was because of all those third party drivers that played games with pointers. PAE is actually enabled in all those 32-bit versions of windows (that's how DEP works); but actually addressing memory above 4GB is dangerous, so they don't.

That's why 32-bit versions of windows server allow >4GB: they just didn't allow those drivers (apparently sound cards were a big culprit)!

captaintrav wrote:
Unless you are running software that's only available as 32 bit binaries

Like Dwarven Fortress, lol.

captaintrav wrote:
or stuff like Wine, that needs 32bitness for completeness.

Yeah, that's why pipelight needs them.

You are absolutely right though, it's the rare case indeed in linux-land to ever need them. As JBI says, Linux is kind of cool in that all of the binary packages in any given distro has probably been compiled in the last 3 years, if not much, much less than that.

captaintrav wrote:
I would love to see a version of Windows 9 or maybe 10 remove 32 bit subsystems by default, or at least make them optional.

Hopeless, hardly anything is compiled for 64 bits, even today. Even in new releases/new software.

One of the neato things available in recent linux kernels is the X32 ABI: all the extra registers and other ISA changes of x86-64 without the extended pointers (and thus memory usage) that provide memory addressing most applications don't need. I've love to see a distro based on that, because I've used i386 in a lot of cases simply because of physical memory constraints.

Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:20 am

Ah, so I can chuck K 14.04/32 on an 8GB box with no issues. Good to know for avoiding 64-bit issues.

captaintrav · Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:32 am

Too lazy to multiquote Glorious, but that's interesting. I always wondered why PAE was locked out of "Desktop" versions of Windows, even though in later versions, it was actually needed for DEP.

X32 in Linux sounds cool, one reason I'm not a fan of 64bit, in general is the ram consumption. Luckily we've standardized on a 64 bit Windows at work, with 4gb machines. /sarcasm

The issue with 64 bit apps on Windows is getting better, albeit slowly and randomly. During our recently completed Windows 7 rollout, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of appllications that have 64 bit binaries. It's not nearly enough, but still more than I expected. Most major browser plugins are available in 64bits now, and IE10 (or is it 11) made 64 bit IE the default (or is it ONLY?) version of the browser.

Sorry for derailing the Ubuntu thread, Unity still sucks. :lol:

Wed Apr 23, 2014 10:52 am

captaintrav wrote:
Oh, and I'm pretty sure most distros ship with a PAE enabled kernel, so you're not really gaining much by going 64bit in some cases, unless you have individual apps that gobble up large amounts of ram in a single instance. I had a box with 32 bit Ubuntu, 8GB of ram happily running a few VMs, some of which were 64 bit just fine. IIRC you get a little more usable RAM with 4gb, too, assuming you are stuck with a bodged BIOS.

Captain Ned wrote:
Ah, so I can chuck K 14.04/32 on an 8GB box with no issues. Good to know for avoiding 64-bit issues.

That's very interesting; I was not aware that this was enabled by default in 32-bit distros. Just verified it for myself -- created a VM with 6GB of RAM, booted the 32-bit Kubuntu 14.04 live CD, and sure enough, it shows 6GB of RAM available. Nice!

captaintrav wrote:
Sorry for derailing the Ubuntu thread, Unity still sucks.

My overall impression of Unity has softened somewhat, but in general yes I agree it still sucks. That's why I use KDE these days unless the system is resource-constrained to the point where KDE does not run well.

Flatland_Spider · Wed Apr 23, 2014 11:41 am

PAE has been default for a while. I have an old Pentium M laptop that is rather useless because of it.

Glorious wrote:
One of the neato things available in recent linux kernels is the X32 ABI: all the extra registers and other ISA changes of x86-64 without the extended pointers (and thus memory usage) that provide memory addressing most applications don't need. I've love to see a distro based on that, because I've used i386 in a lot of cases simply because of physical memory constraints.

Debian is supposed to be working on compiling packages as x32. I'm not sure how far along they are though.

captaintrav wrote:
Oh, and I'm pretty sure most distros ship with a PAE enabled kernel, so you're not really gaining much by going 64bit in some cases, unless you have individual apps that gobble up large amounts of ram in a single instance. I had a box with 32 bit Ubuntu, 8GB of ram happily running a few VMs, some of which were 64 bit just fine.

64-bit compiled binaries are quicker then 32-bit binaries due to the ISA enhancements present in x86-64. In system with less then 2GB of memory, 32-bit is abetter idea since it uses less memory, but aside from that, it's better to go with 64-bit.

captaintrav · Wed Apr 23, 2014 12:43 pm

Flatland_Spider wrote:
PAE has been default for a while. I have an old Pentium M laptop that is rather useless because of it.

Glorious wrote:
One of the neato things available in recent linux kernels is the X32 ABI: all the extra registers and other ISA changes of x86-64 without the extended pointers (and thus memory usage) that provide memory addressing most applications don't need. I've love to see a distro based on that, because I've used i386 in a lot of cases simply because of physical memory constraints.

Debian is supposed to be working on compiling packages as x32. I'm not sure how far along they are though.

captaintrav wrote:
Oh, and I'm pretty sure most distros ship with a PAE enabled kernel, so you're not really gaining much by going 64bit in some cases, unless you have individual apps that gobble up large amounts of ram in a single instance. I had a box with 32 bit Ubuntu, 8GB of ram happily running a few VMs, some of which were 64 bit just fine.

64-bit compiled binaries are quicker then 32-bit binaries due to the ISA enhancements present in x86-64. In system with less then 2GB of memory, 32-bit is abetter idea since it uses less memory, but aside from that, it's better to go with 64-bit.

IANAP, but doesn't it depend what sort of code you are running for the 64bit binary to be quicker than 32-bit? I'm fairly certain it's not just an automatic x% performance increase. I would think it is a wash, depending on how many apps you're running. Maybe what DE you're using too. All your performance goes out the Window(s) when you start swapping. :wink:

I have a system limited to 2gb with a CULV processor, and a couple of drives, I should do a side by side to see if I can notice much difference, at least in my usage.

Wed Apr 23, 2014 12:51 pm

If you're not right on the edge of being constrained by RAM, 64-bit should perform better due to the ISA enhancements. Depending on the DE you're using 2GB RAM may not be enough though; I certainly wouldn't recommend running recent versions of KDE in 2GB.

captaintrav · Wed Apr 23, 2014 1:02 pm

just brew it! wrote:
If you're not right on the edge of being constrained by RAM, 64-bit should perform better due to the ISA enhancements. Depending on the DE you're using 2GB RAM may not be enough though; I certainly wouldn't recommend running recent versions of KDE in 2GB.

TBH I haven't the 64 bit spin of many flavours on 2GB, trying 64 bit Windows on 2Gb really ruined the idea for me, but that's not apples to apples. Maybe I'll redo my XBMC box with a 64bit distro next, I went 32bit Lubuntu because I only had 2GB, I'm guessing I was being overly conservative.

Mem:   2045324k total,  1269328k used,   775996k free,   453572k buffers
Swap:  2078716k total,        0k used,  2078716k free,   450652k cached

Flatland_Spider · Wed Apr 23, 2014 2:20 pm

Linux handles 2GB of RAM much better then Vista/7. Even the 64-bit version runs fine in 2GB of RAM (I regularly run x64 Linux in low mem VMs and on old hardware. Xfce or Gnome2 if there is a DE installed), but for serious conservation, 2GB or less should get 32-bit. Which gets back to what people are trying to do with x32.

Ubuntu 13.10 32-bit vs. 64-bit
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 3264&num=1

Concupiscence · Wed Apr 23, 2014 3:26 pm

just brew it! wrote:
If you're not right on the edge of being constrained by RAM, 64-bit should perform better due to the ISA enhancements. Depending on the DE you're using 2GB RAM may not be enough though; I certainly wouldn't recommend running recent versions of KDE in 2GB.

Neither would I. And Fedora 20 x64 with GNOME 3 doesn't fare any better - sitting on the desktop doing nothing, the activity monitor indicated it was eating about 750 MB of the available 2 gigs in my Frankenputer at the time. XFCE, LXDE, and traditional window managers should be fine in 2 gigs, unless you're running something big...

Wirko · Wed Apr 23, 2014 4:41 pm

The Core 2 generation has a deficiency (lack of macro-op fusion in 64-bit mode) that makes some 64-bit applications run unexpectedly slow. I don't know how much of a problem this is but Kanter praises Nehalem for correcting that.

http://www.realworldtech.com/nehalem/5/

Wed Apr 23, 2014 4:54 pm

Flatland_Spider wrote:
Linux handles 2GB of RAM much better then Vista/7.

I would probably qualify that with "...provided you don't try to run KDE as your DE".

irvinenomore · Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:13 pm

It's the lens that hacks me off rather than the sidebar. I run my Windoze menus on the left hand side of the screen so from my perspective they got that bit of Unity right!

When I heard 14.04 had been released I installed Elementary OS in place of 12.04 in my dual boot laptop. Have customized it a bit and found the desktop to be simple but reasonably functional. There are a couple of drawbacks though, like not being able to do a file search in the file manager or from the desktop.

Put Mint on the DM1 netbook a while ago. Know everybody loves Mint but I find it a little too close to Windows for my liking.

Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:17 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I certainly wouldn't recommend running recent versions of KDE in 2GB.

I had heard your concerns, but in the base install and printer driver install processes I didn't feel any real slowdown due to the 1GB (the printer driver slowdowns were all directly attributable to my long absence from CLI and the Linux insistence on case dependence. Bloody thing must have thought me an idiot before I stopped fat-fingering it to the point where it finally installed). Granted, I didn't push things, but basic web browsing (Firefox) and navigating the file system seemed OK. Said lappy now has 4GB, so KDE should be happy. Read the Ars review of U 14.04 and am happy with my choice. U wants to be universal, while K is all about the desktop. I can grok that.

Formatting the new WD Red for the last image of XPSP3 and all the data drives.

EDIT: If there's a way to directly image my current XPSP3 install into something I can shove into a VM under K 14.04, I'm all ears, and I have the spare space.

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