Ubuntu goes 3-D

a tool...

"a tool dubbed AppArmor"

I suppose that's Novell's AppArmor, surely?

Fast checking and Compiz

Guys (Pooper and Colin), if you are gonna dis the reg, get yer facts right.

Desktops searches have indeed been part of many linux distros for many years. But... Tracker is new, and Shuttleworth only mentions he believes they are the first to deliver Tracker out of the box... Tracker...

Yes, reporters are supposed to report verbatum. That is their Job. Anything else become news "invention" and not reporting. Do we really want the reg to degrade to the level of the mainstream press?

I don't. In fact the mainstream press would do well to return to the model of news reporting and not news making themselves.

Now about Compiz. Compiz had had many changes because it was forked, then reintegrated over the last year or so. This is the first COMPIZ (in post merge form) release for all distros (including Mandriva). It is not the first release of a 3D desktop for Linux. Not even close, but its the first one that works well and looks great.

Look these things up boys (or pay attention), and then you wont look foolish.

New facilities?

As others have pointed out, file indexing is nothing new:

- Beagle has been in Fedora since at least release 5 and is integrated with the Nautilus file manager

- 'locate' was in Redhat Linux from well before Fedora. OK, its a command line utility but adding a graphical wrapper to it is scarcely rocket science.

Apparmor sounds suspiciously like SELinux to me - and *that* has been in Fedora since Fedora Core 2, when kernel 2.6 became standard. I think Apparmor has been part of Debian about as long as SELinux has been part of RedHat distros

I'm sure Ubuntu is very nice (its improved graphics sounds like nice eye candy and might even benefit those running FlightGear) but they really shouldn't claim that Tracker or Apparmor are new and your reporter should also know that they already available elsewhere.

Compiz

Ashlee, I don't really mind the way you wrote about Compiz. It's just worth pointing out how Mark is carefully futzing the issues in the way he presents them in order to try and make it look as much as possible like Ubuntu is doing something new and innovative - or at least is not heavily behind other distributions.

However, it is a bit annoying that you don't mention at *all* that Ubuntu is nowhere near being the first to include *any* of this stuff. I'm sure if Microsoft were trumpeting things that other people had done first in a new release, you'd add a snide side note to that effect, that's why we love the Reg. :) Why doesn't Ubuntu merit this treatment?

On Tracker, it's impossible to tell from the way the article is written whether Mark claimed that Ubuntu was the first to deliver *desktop search*, or whether it was the first to deliver *Tracker*. As he is a smart bloke, I'll assume he does at least know that SUSE has been including Beagle for ages, even if he didn't know Mandriva's done it before, so I will assume he didn't actually claim that Ubuntu was the first to deliver desktop search. However, as he is also a consummate publicist, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was careful to arrange his quote so that - when soundbitten - it could give that *impression*. Which is the case here. From the way this article is written, the interpretations "Ubuntu is the first to deliver desktop search out of the box" and "Ubuntu is the first to deliver Tracker out of the box" are equally valid and it is impossible to know which of the two Mark was claiming. I'm sure he's not displeased that it reads this way. :)

Shad, you look a bit silly telling Colin to 'look things up'. His was instrumental in getting Compiz included in Mandriva Linux 2007, and he is still one of the main contributors working on 3D desktop packaging in Mandriva.

@wow

Gusty does now include a graphical WPA connection utility. It's as easy as selecting your network and popping in the key.

@wow, 2

...and Mandriva has been able to graphically configure WPA connections since, um, 2005 if I remember correctly.

@Adam W, etc.

...and MY Dad's bigger than YOUR Dad!

Come on guys, there are plenty Linux distros out there that due a damn fine job. If you like Ubuntu, use Ubuntu. If you like Mandriva, use Mandriva. This is starting to sound like the PC v Mac arguments, or even SNES v Megadrive.

@wow

> I realise Linux can connect to WPA, but there's no easy GUI way yet :o(

Funny - I've been connecting to WPA networks with my laptop using the Network Manager GUI since Dapper - and a darn sight easier and more reliably than with most Windows PCs. When I'm diagnosing problems with a customer's wireless network the first thing I do is try to connect up with my Linux laptop because "it just works".

Who Cares ?

Most of the above chatter simply illustrates, for me, why Linux will struggle to enter the home and displace MS.

Me at PC World: I want a computer

Salesman:Certainly sir, heres a nice Dell, what OS would you like on it ? Windows or Linux ?

Me: Err Linux ?

Salesman: Certainly sir, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Mandriva... (100 names later) ? And which grapical front end to go with it?

Me: Sod it, cripple it with Vista

And until all the Nux geeks can stop bitching it will remain that way for Joe Public. In the meantime, good luck Ubuntu and I look forward to a really successful launch of Stoned Stoat :)

(oh I have a TM on that, just in case LOL)

@Adam Williamson

Hi Adam

You're right to point out the inaccuracies in the article, and I've been grateful for your help on the forums when I was a regular Mandrake/Mandriva user. However, I'm hearing a touch of sour grapes here. Ubuntu's success isn't entirely down to hype - I switched to Ubuntu after many years as a Mandriva user because (for me at least) it met my needs better. I'm not going to go into all the reasons here and now - I'm not trying to put down Mandriva, which I still respect, and different distros will suit different people better - but for me, Ubuntu/Kubuntu currently meets my needs better than Mandriva (or any other OS I've tried to date) does.

Still, I agree that Ubuntu is hyped too much - it's not perfect, and the other distros also have their strengths.

Andy B

@Andy

It's not about sour grapes. I don't mind at all a fair comparison between Mandriva and Ubuntu, and if you've made one and decided Ubuntu's better for you, good for you. What we (other distros in general) do not like is when general tech sites - whose readership often doesn't even *know* about other distros - report on Ubuntu as if it were the only game in town, and it were actually directly responsible for all the stuff it's actually just packaging from other projects (and that other distros frequently got there first). Given that my continued ability to, you know, eat depends on people knowing that Ubuntu is *not* in fact the only game in town, I make no apologies for attempting to draw attention to this fact in important venues such as The Reg :)

@Adrian Esdaile

If you haven't tried a distro in the last year or two they've made quite an improvement recently. I'd say even between Ubuntu 6.06.1 (from last year) and 7.04, the difference is huge. Let alone 7.10.

"Now, come on, let's get real here - NOTHING works properly. Ever. Every signle program is missing some feature, be it compatability, stability, usability, a UI that doesn't look like angry fruit salad. Apps are full of control panels that have a metric shitload of options, seemingly laid out by the same monkeys who are writing Hamlet."

Bullllllllllshit. I wouldn't review any OS and say *nothing* works right, even Windows. And again newer distros (at least Ubuntu for sure but I think others as well) have improved a lot on the metric craploads of random control panels.. which certainly was true at least. I know with an older version of KDE I used to have a control center, control panel, and settings menu. Who knows what was where? Even with my gentoo install this appears to have been pared down to a more reasonable number of menus at some point.

"You STILL need to be good with a command line (hey - I cut my teeth on Solaris 1, using Eagle) and have to know arcane command line switches that are more like D&D stats than useful options."

I've tried using Ubuntu just with strictly the GUI. Basically I've been able to do all I want strictly via GUI, other than the odd tweak on some system or other. When I've needed to do that, it's more a matter of finding a suggestion in the ubuntu forum and typing in what they say at a command line, rather than having to come up with your own command line to do what you need. Once you get to that point, I think it's actually easier to type (or even cut and paste) a command line than to try to click through a bunch of menus following some forum directions.

"I install it, look at it, try to find a use for it, try to install Windows in WINE (whine?) so I can run my CAD apps that will NEVER be written for Linux, and find out, AGAIN, that Linux is still a toy."

By that logic any OS but Windows is a toy because it can't run some Windows apps you want. Hell by your definition, newer Windows versions are a toy for not running apps for older Windows versions (see 64-bit Windows and Vista incompatibilities with quite a few apps.) But, yeah, if you've got Windows apps you need and they don't run under Wine, that's a reasonably good reason to run Windows. I think wine would be a good project for someone (Novell, even perhaps Canonical) to fund, having ~100% Windows compatibility instead of ~90% would really be a blow against Microsoft.

@Adrian Esdaile

If you're trying to install Windows into Wine, then it's no wonder you're having problems. Maybe if you got a clue about what you were doing, then we wouldn't have to suffer your ill informed rants here.

Oh, and you also need to learn the difference between an operating system and a distribution.

@ Graham Lockley

I suppose you go into the supermarket and expect to buy nothing but porridge for breakfast too. Idiot. Still, it saves you having to think I suppose, just be a happy consumer.

Personally, the longer uneducated people like you two stay away from alternative OS's, the better.

And yes, I realise that this is a stereotypical linux users response, but, get this - you are responsible for your own intelligence. Don't expect people to rush to the aid of wilfully ignorant lusers.

Pardon me for butting in...

I'm almost deterred from adding my sixpen'orth because this particular comments section seems to be a flamewar between people who know each other.

So I'll restrict myself to saying that of all the distros I've tried (half-a-dozen over about six years) I find Ubuntu by far the most convivial. For me at least, virtually everything *does* just work. Ubuntu is the best candidate to popularise Linux to the world at large IMO.

I don't much like Windows although I have to use either W2K SP4 or XP Pro SP2 most days (partly because neither PhotoShop nor InDesign are ported to 'nix; partly because my clients use MS Office apps and OO is *not* fully compatible yet).

My dislike is partly prejudice - I don't like Microsoft on principle. But it's also practical. Only a fool would claim Windows isn't beset by a lot of security issues and it isn't particularly stable. And, especially in the case of Vista, Windows is a bloated, sluggish resource hog.

But for 'nix fanboys to claim Windows 'doesn't work' is self-evident bollocks. It's also counter-productive - telling people your preference in software is wonderful but their choice reveals stupidity and ignorance doesn't win hearts and minds.

I'm looking forward to Gutless Gibbon (or whatever it's called) and I expect to see improvements and enhancements. That's more than I've ever said about a Windows release.

Forget Alliteration ...

... it should have been "Funky"

@Alan

'Don't expect people to rush to the aid of wilfully ignorant lusers'

many years ago I was more than happy to spend hours tinkering with a system to find out what it could do and how I could improve it, laughing all the time at people who struggled to use Win3.1 and couldn't be bothered to learn how to do things. Now I have far more important and interesting things to do with my time. I don't want to have to spend hours trawling forums for help and editing this file or the other to make something work. I want something that works out of the box and in an awful lot of cases linux doesn't. That doesn't mean I am not capable of getting it working but why should I waste my time bothering? If the programmers wanted to make more of an impact on the desktop they would make it far easier to install, configure and maintain and not expect that everyone has a degree in computer science. The problem with most projects like this is on the whole they rely on uni students and those still living at home age 40 to do the coding as they are the only people who have the time to spend hours working on it without worrying who is going to pay them for it as they are still doing it for the joy of getting something to work. Once you pass that stage in your life spending 50+ hours working for no reward isn't as attractive. Spending 3 hours on the forums trying to make my mouse work in a virtual machine with ubuntu is 3 hours away from my kids, or the pub with mates, or the cinema or any one thing you care to mention that you enjoy doing.

@Graham Lockley

Was that the Starter, Home Basic, Ultimate, Business or Enterprise version that you wanted?

@Adrian Esdaile: How sad for you. My mother now uses Ubuntu having used Macs and PCs for years at work. She likes it 'because it just works'. Maybe you should get some remedial computer lessons.

Modern day PCs

@Graham Lockley

PC retailers would only ship one flavour of *nix pre-installed. If they give you a choice they will go broke. Plain and simple. By all means sell COTS boxes, but don't install.

@'But XXX had it first'

Big deal. I read an article on the Beeb yesterday on what made books sell.

10 things which makes technology sell.

1) Advertisement

2) People believing it will put them 'above the Jones' '

3) Advertisement

4) Believing everyone else is using it.

5) Advertisement

6) Well, you get the idea....

7) Advertisement

8) ...Random lying key-phrases.

9) You can't live with out

10) You want to buy

If people don't hype a technology product the flock of sheep (new unit for XX average consumers, 1 flock?) just won't be interested. So, just like MS lie through thier teeth about what Vista brings (XP with glitz...) every distro producer should - to some extent. Honesty doesn't win this game.

GNU/Linux doesn't support current CAD software. True, it's a shame. So for designing a house with your current software won't work. Mind you, winXP is absolutely useless unstable twoddle. None of my software compiled for *nix will run on it.

People work on projects that interest them. When they have time. When they don't have time they are typically holding down a full time job.

I can also ensure you that MUCH MORE work is going on on the boring stuff than on the glitz. It's just that people don't brag about it.

Give me a break

Alan: Please don't try to categorise people as consumerist sheep because they happen to use Windows and disagree with your choice of OS. Your list of assumptions is crass and thoughtless and you display all the characteristics of a fundamentalist. You could just as easily be categorised as another thoughtless Linux user and in this instance the sheep analogy is probably more apt; the process is reductive and cliché ridden. As he doesn't conform to your world-view he's already "clueless," "ill-informed" but Graham is an "idiot" and they're both "wilfully ignorant lusers."

I mean you're not seriously trying to play the anti-corporate card here, are you? You aren't seriously trying to suggest that you're one of the enlightened, conscientious, culture-jamming, establishment destroying heroes are you? I take it then you don't have Sky telly, don't shop at supermarkets, don't watch corporate media, read corporate newspapers that you really have found the path of righteousness that separates you from the rest of us? Do you really think that using a non-Windows OS really separates you from the caricatured sheep people? Do you really think the Establishment is threatened by you? They're just laughing at your small mindedness and your conformity because you're an authoritarian too, you just want people to do what they're told as well. It's this kind of fundamentalist view of the world is more of a threat to our freedoms that a million Microsoft's.

@Alan

Ahh. And here we have the main reason why Linux still isn't the major desktop O/S.

You are right - a stereotypical Linux users response. And offensive with it. No change there for anyone who has asked advice on a Linux forum. It's not the ignorant users that are the problem - Ignorant users can still use windows (mostly). They can't use Linux (and although its getting better, I still wouldn't put it on my parents PC). And that is Linux's problem - not the users.

And I use Ubuntu, Suse and embedded Linux every day at work and have Ubuntu at home....

.

@Graham Lockley

Perhaps if you go into a decent PC shop where staff know a little about what they are talking about (clearly this rules out PCWorld) then you would have

"I want a computer"

"Certainly sir, heres a nice Dell, what OS would you like on it ? Windows or Linux?

"What are the differences?

"Well Windows does x1, y1, z1, but has problems in x2, y2, z2. Linux does x3, y3, z3, d3, e3, f3, and has problems with g3, h3, i3"

"Well I'll have Linux"

"What distribution RedHat, Mandriva, UBuntu ?"

"What are the differences?"

"Well they all have about the same functionality, but Mandriva is maybe best at a, b, c, RedHat is maybe best at d, e, and UBuntu is maybe best at f, g"

"Ok, I'll try Mandriva".

How hard is that ? Ok, may be easier for you to go down your local PCWorld and leave your brain at home, just like their staff, but then when you get back home from there with your Vista crippleware you only have yourself to blame. Alternatively you ask questions, and you have to think. You could easily gather this information by buying a decent PC magazine who all review Linux distros. Too hard for you? Then don't whine about Linux distros

Why can't we all just... get along?

Some people have to use Windows, either because their jobs require it, or because they don't feel confident enough to try something unfamiliar.

Some people prefer Macs. Their reasons are their own, but I can certainly understand their viewpoint.

Others choose to use GNU/Linux/BSD/Unix/Solaris/Whatever, and that's okay as well.

If someone's decided to give linux* a go, then it makes sense for them to cut their teeth on a distro which is simple to install and use, and for that I'd have no hesitation in recommending Ubuntu. It really does "just work" (by which I mean that it simply works, not that it barely works) and it's really very easy for novices to pick up and run with. It also acts as quite a good ambassador for the *nix fraternity, as the bells and whistles which it allows even a four-year-old box to show off can impress even the most ardent Win/Mac fan.

At the same time, there are other distros which are considerably "better" for other purposes; it's a big market, and every niche and corner seems to be covered pretty well. I expect that people who "learn" *nix through Ubuntu will be more confident trying other distros from the safety of their new comfort zone. My thirteen-year-old son, who only recently started using Ubuntu in anger, has since been experimenting with Solaris, Mandriva and... erm... some other whose name escapes me at present. (You'll have to forgive me; I fall into the first category I listed above; I'm forced to use Windows primarily, because of the nature of my work.) - Okay, he's unlikely to be using these other distros seriously (and he's mostly looking for other "cool" stuff) but the point is he's _looking_...

Hey, at the end of the day we're all geeks, aren't we? Shouldn't we be uniting against our common enemy or something?

Uh... Medja whores, eh? Bunch of cunts.

*'Cos GNU/Linux, while technically correct, is more of a handful to type. Sorry.

Help yourself

Who cares what comes with which distro ? You can have anything you want. All you need to know, is how to type ./configure and make.

. . . (y)hfref, jub arrqf gurz ?

Flashy 3-D graphics cause global warming

"[Compiz] adds a contemporary feel to the often 1990s looking Linux desktop"

I use Linux precisely because it *doesn't* commandeer 90% of my machine's RAM and CPU capacity simply to render the desktop.

Call me old-fashioned, but my first reaction to flashy 3-D graphics and animation effects is not "Woo! Shiny! I want one!". I'm more likely to think that those CPU cycles could be put to better use.

And since CPU cycles consume energy, I'd even go so far as to argue that flashy desktop graphics contribute to global warming.

@Alan

>>And yes, I realise that this is a stereotypical linux users response

Jeepers mate, you ain't wrong. It just stuns me how much this sort of response keeps small Linux distros not just a minority cleeks, but utterly irrelevant ones.

@Graham Lockley

I both agree and disagree with you - yes the arguing between different desktop / distro fans will stop Linux becoming mainstream - however, the fact that there are different distros and desktops to choose from is the strength of Linux on the desktop.... If you don't like the XP/Vista/MAC desktop, your pretty much stuck with it (bar a couple of creature comfort changes) - whereas Linux, you have the option to change and choose.

Linux fans just need to agree to disagree and then move forward to try and help each other.

Yes, there are a few things that don't work in Ubuntu, but there are more than a few things that don't work in Windows, and at least Ubuntu are happy to hold their hands up and try and fix/address it (hell, they even don't mind if you fix it yourself and tell them about it).