Trying out Ubuntu 9.04
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Wanted to get the HP back in play so put Ubuntu 9.04 on it to try it out.
Replaced the drive with an OCZ SSD drive, certainly is quick, boots in 5 seconds.
Anyway what can I tell you;
- There's now a nice windows-esque full screen installer, with the ubuntu ibex wallpaper in the backgroud
- mousepad double-tap is disabled by default, YES!
- You've got the latest software, obviously
- There's new packages like firmware-utils, usbutils, also noticed some nvidia and ati packages installing there in the background.
- The wifi support looks much more competent
- With VLC, the display speed does seem a lot quicker and there's no annoying DVD stutter from the get-go
The kernel is 2.6.28-8 at time of writing, and thru the installer it gives you better options to encrypt your home drive.
Stability on my Alpha 4 version is more or less rock-solid, I wouldn't run a server on it but it should do just fine for my homework laptop. VLC did just crash with some dvd menu's, but then it's never been too happy with those.
Think i'll be sticking with this one, will update as the experience progresses, but so far thumbs up dev-team and all the supporters; definitely an xp killer.
...just updated with aptitude, 413 new packages ;-)
Fancy Effects with Emerald
Monday, 19 May 2008
After the kr0w commented on my Ubuntu install post about the Emerald Theme Manager I had to try it out myself.
Installing
To get emerald and it's dependencies do,
sudo aptitude install emerald
Enabling
Emerald isn't enabled by default in Hardy, but you can enable it in the command line to try it out,
emerald --replace &
To keep it, edit the compiz-decorator file,
sudo nano /usr/bin/compiz-decorator
Look for the line...
USE_EMERALD="no"
Change this to yes, save and next time you boot you'll be using the Emerald Theme Engine.
Keep losing top of windows?
After install Emerald and playing around with it I noticed I kept losing the top bar to my windows and corners, making things pretty unusable.
Found out I needed the Xgl Server which was missing in my build, you can check if this is the problem by,
compiz --replace
This runs checks to see whats available and the health of your compiz setup, mine told me I was missing Xgl.
Which was rectified by,
sudo aptitude install xserver-xgl
And a reboot, after which things started to work right.
Restarting X Server
If things start to break up you can restart the X windowing system with CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE.
Avant Window Manager
You can also get the Leopard-like dashboard by installing the AWN,
sudo aptitude install avant-window-navigator
This'll really make people green with envy, however after installing that my double-tap issue came back with the touchpad, but that was quickly rectified by editing my xorg.conf file,
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
And adding,
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
Under the options for the Synaptics Touchpad, after a reboot I was back up and running,
