Living up to the Lucid Lynx Hype

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx has a lot of hype. Usually I find the hype in anything, less than true.

However, not in this case. For once Canonical got it right and made good on making a better Ubuntu.

First Ubuntu 10.04 is a LTS (Long Term Support) release and they usually make the extra effort because of that. It shows with Lucid. Keeping in mind the next LTS isn't until the 12.04 release which is in two years. Previously canonical didn't get to radical with an LTS release. This time, well radical is putting it mildy.

Big pluses: More hardware support, astounding graphics and sound has improved. Updated software with new featues (including my favorite system monitor gkrellm)

Major problem: Firefox is flakey (I had to make Google Chrome ny default browser.) I should state this is not Canonical's fault entirely, as Mozilla made some severe changes with 3.6 and I had same issue with 3.6 in Karmic and had to revert back to 3.5 to have a stable copy of Firefox.

For the record I want it to be said despite the Firefox issue I am very impressed with the Lynx. It definitely boots faster and is a lot more responsive and smoother than the Koala was.

This was the first time I have ever done an online upgrade where something didn't blow up almost immediately. Canonical went to a lot of trouble to make this proccess a lot better. In the past a lot of software was removed. This time however only a couple of programs were removed and it was not an issue getting them reinstalled. However, I still had to go in and remove unwanted packages. Even so it wasn't all that bad. For once I will recommend the online update for those who don't want the hassle of retweaking their setup.

Yes its definitely worth the upgrade. Yes I highly recommend doing so, even using the online update though a fresh install is probably faster as it took me nearly 4 hours to get through the complete proccess.

The thing I like the most: usplash is finally deprecated. I have never been a fan of usplash and with plymouth now taking over the boot splash procedure I think were finally going to see some really neat boot splash screens.

I have been playing with Lucid now working with it and its really very pleasent. None of the little glitches from Karmic seem to be present and so far only Firefox has given me any real problems, but I wasn't surprised by them. Since I am finding Google Chrome to run a bit better than Firefox ever did I am not to upset.

The only other thing I had a problem with was getting the GDM greeter to look like I wanted, the run gnome-control-center at the login screen trick like we did in Karmic, well doesn't work. So I found a neat little program called python-gdm2setup. To get it, do the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gdm2setup/gdm2setup

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get-install python-gdm2setup

to use: gksu gdm2setup

The only thing it doesn't do is change the cursor, gonna ask them to add that ability though.

Ubuntu users are going to find themselves using a vastly improved and more friendly (to both the casual and power user) desktop that stands out beyond just your typical Linux system. Thoughs new to Linux will gain access to many new features they never had before.

10.04 is not the MS killer Linux system but 10.10 just very well maybe.

Kubuntu Issues

Okay one issue I had with feisty fawn was the inability to get my Palm Device to sync with KPilot. I am happy to now report that issue is resolved. I learned that the visor module was not being loaded so I had to add the following into /etc/modules file, 'visor' and then sudo modprobe visor which got it up and running. I was finally able to import my contact list into Kontact (Kaddress Book.)

Next step is seeing if I can get my schedule and to do lists to sync up.

For some reason I can't seem to get Konversation to use emoticons. I haven't done it in awhile and I seem to remember there was a minor issue with a capital letter being used in the KDE wiki that was errant and I'm trying to remember what line it was on but alas my memory is a bit fuzzy there.

However getting Dazuko (hence KlamAV) and Kpilot going is a good day of messing with things and I am very happy to see improvements happening in the direction i want and need them to go.

Also determined which applications actually worked and which ones didn't. Gyachi was a disappointment in the long run. It took to much memory and did very little compared to kopete, aMSN on the other hand is running very well and I honestly can't tell to much difference between it and the actual MSN Messenger, and my webcam works in it. Knemo is my network monitor program of choice. The others didn't seem to do as much or give quite as much information. Knemo will show both my Wired and Wireless connections and when they are inactive it doesn't annoy me with a network unplugged icon, it just doesn't show anything.

The power manager/monitor programs I tried were also a bit nowhere and though I got somewhat better reports from them they also didn't completely function as expected so I went back to the KDE default. I have also been able to lower my CPU draw by watching which programs were hogging it up and removing those from the startup as well.

My CPU draw goes from 4% to 25% when I'm doing simple things and when I do the tough stuff jumps to about 65% though when I run a scan or search it definitely jumps way up (99 to 100%)