Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell First Impression

I just updated my Arch Linux installation and it has Gnome 3 by default. I followed the Arch Wiki about Gnome 3 for the installation and it went smooth.

As for the first impression, it is at least much better than Ubuntu Unity interface. For one thing, it does not have the annoying Global Menu. However, I still prefer the old Gnome 2 interface. Anyway, the new interface is at least tolerable, not like Ubuntu Unity. I think I can get used to it soon even though I still miss the Gnome Panel Applets.

I tend to think Unity is one way for Ubuntu to differentiate it from other Linux distros, let's wait and see if that really pans out well for Ubuntu or not.

Notes added on 17 July 2011: however, the problem is with the Nvidia driver. Gnome 3 just does not work well with the Nvidia driver right now under Arch Linux. So I have to switch back to the Fall Back mode.

Ubuntu 11.04 -- Unity Interface is not usable

I have just updated my Ubuntu 10.10 installation to 11.04. To be honest, I do not like the new Unity interface. I would say the old Gnome interface is much easier to use. Windows 7 is also way better. I might be able to get used to it in the future, but for now I will go back to the classic desktop and wait for Ubuntu to fix the Unity interface.

Major problems:
1) The launcher is basically useless, the autohide works too well so that it does not come out when I need it from time to time.
2) Software center is getting better but I still prefer Synaptic. Anyway, Synaptic is still there.
3) There is no "Show Desktop" icon. This is not that bad but still I prefer to have it.
4) I miss the gnome-panel applets.
5) I do not like the global menu. This is the most annoying feature. I do not have a Mac and I am not used to this "feature".
6) I do not quite like Dash, I prefer the old Gnome menu system where I can access the applications with less mouse clicks.

Anything I like about Unity? Nothing!

I think Unity will be like KDE 4 when it was first launched (I still do not install KDE now) and it will take some time for Ubuntu to fix it. Maybe Ubuntu Unity can get usable next year, say 12.04.

Anyway, there seems to be a good guide for those who want to use Unity.
http://castrojo.tumblr.com/post/4795149014/the-power-users-guide-to-unity

Edits on 1 May 2011:
After disable the global menu and fix the launcher to never hide and add some common application to the Launcher, the Unity Interface is at least tolerable again.

Still need to find a way to move the maximize/minize/close buttons to the right when application is maximized. When it is not maximized, the buttons are on the right which is fine, but they move to the left when the application is maximized. This is quite annoying.

Notes on 17 July 2011:
Enabled the global menu for a while and still does not like it very much, but it can be tolerable now. And I keep the maximize/minimize/close button to the default left side now.

So Unity interface is usable now, but still not that good.

Ubuntu 10.10 Installed

Ubuntu 10.10 installation on my Acer desktop is rather smooth. I was using upgrade install for the 10.04 LTS release. Since there is an empty partition this time (giving up FreeBSD), I am using fresh install this time. Firstly I downloaded the ISO, installed it to an 8GB USB Flash Disk, boot the USB drive, played a bit with the live session. Then I installed it to the empty partition. It was a very smooth process.

Still the open source Nvidia driver is quite flaky (even the font it not clear) for my old shared Nvidia graphics card, so I opted to install the proprietary driver which is much more usable. After switching to a normal theme (to be able to close the window from the upper-right corner) and disabling the visual effect and installing a bunch of software packages, I am in business. Thanks to the fast broadband (16Mbps) and fast Ubuntu Singapore mirror, the whole process is actually not long.

As for the first impression, I have not yet noticed any real difference. It is just quite smooth.

Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64bit

Today I upgraded one of my desktop partition from Ubuntu 9.10 64bit to 10.04 64bit. The upgrade process is relatively smooth. Download from local Singapore mirror is quite fast. Installation is not that fast (more than 2 hours for 2700 packages, no KDE, just Gnome). But all in all the process is quite ok.

Just a minor glitch -- I was not using Network Manager but wicd. Prior to the upgrade, I uninstalled wicd and did not install Network Manager. Therefore, after reboot, I did not have the wired network. Still two commands away, I had the network up again (sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.110; sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1). Then I installed Network Manager and next reboot my wired network is automatically up.

BTW, the mirror seems to have problem with one qt4 package right now (libqt4-xmlpatterns). So I had to uninstall it before the upgrade.

The default theme has the window buttons in the left side. I still prefer them to be on the right side. So I change the theme back to Human.

Ubuntu 9.10 x64 for the Asus K40ID Notebook

Today I installed Ubuntu 9.10 64bit for the new Asus K40ID notebook. It was relatively a smooth process with only one problem related to X.

Firstly I shrunk the Windows 7 data partition (Asus keeps OS in C and others in D, with another hidden Fat32 recovery partition) with Windows 7's built-in disk manager. It was a nice add-on since Vista. Then I boot the install CD (cum Live CD), check everything is fine (including X and wireless). Then I partitioned the empty disk (swap, Linux1 and Linux2). Linux 2 is empty now since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is on the way. Then I installed Ubuntu 9.10 x64 to the Linux1 partition. Everything is fine. However, after reboot, the screen just flickered and could not go into X. So I had to boot into recovery mode, used the wire connection, installed the Nvidia proprietary driver.

After that, I have no issues any more. X is fine. Wireless is fine. The Fn key also seems to function well. Sound is fine.

Ubuntu 9.10 64bit Installed

I have not really tried to use 64bit Linux with the exception of an short and aborted experiment with Ubuntu 6.06 64bit. Now that 64bit OS becomes more popular and I think I will give it a try. Ubuntu 9.10 64bit is the nature choice since I am at home with Ubuntu after using it since 5.04.

The fresh installation (using ext4) was a very smooth process. The installation cd is also a live cd. So I could try it out before real installation. The live cd could not run at full resolution with my Nvidia card but this was expected. With the proprietary driver from Nvidia, the display worked fine.

For the fresh boot, X did not work, complaining the module nvidia did not exist. That was not a problem. I boot with the vesa server and then install the proprietary driver and reboot, X worked fine again.

Flash player is no longer a problem with this latest Ubuntu 64bit OS. So that is a good sign.

Media (mp3, xvid coded avi, rmvb, etc) playing with Totem and VLC is in general fine as well even though some old RMVB file are still a bit problematic.

Firefox occasionally still crashed and that is again expected by me. It is the single most often used and most often crashed program for me under Linux.

I have some programs (gputils, sdcc, openocd, pk2cmd and some other libusb related programs like pyusb and lpcusb) and recompiling them is in general quite simple. I could not find old glib-1.2 related packages in the repository but I will try later (Edit: download glib-1.2 and gtk-1.2 related packages from Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 and they seem to work fine for Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64).

So in general, Ubuntu 9.10 64bit seems to work fine for me now.

Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 upgrade is smooth

Yesterday evening I tried to upgrade Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. It was a very smooth process, 1700+ packages were upgraded, some obsolete packages were removed, and after a reboot, Ubuntu 9.10 was installed without an issue. It runs smooth and all the common applications run well (Firefox, media players, OpenOffice, wine, common development tools, Samba client, etc). iBus is now included and I like it better than SCIM for Chinese input.

Restore Default Gnome Panels In Ubuntu

Yesterday I was trying Ubuntu Netbook Remix under Ubuntu 9.04 for my desktop. It somehow crashed quite often and not usable at all. I used the desktop-switcher (which comes with the ubuntu-netbook-remix packages) to set it back to the normal Ubuntu Gnome Desktop. It did not work well. The Gnome panel was in a strange state. Then I uninstalled Ubuntu Netbook Remix related packages. Things became worse. Normal gnome session became a empty desktop with only the background image. I had to go back to the termail (CTRL-ALT-F1), restart gdm and use LXDE instead.

Google came to rescue again. The following website has the instructions on how to restore the default gnome panel and it works for me. After three commands, I am back in business.
http://www.watchingthenet.com/restore-panels-in-ubuntu-back-to-their-default-settings.html

gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
pkill gnome-panel

Chinese Linux Forums

Here are some forums related to Linux in China. It is useful to search for tips related to Chinese font, input method and other things related to use Chinese under Linux.

LinuxSir
http://www.linuxsir.org/bbs/forum39.html

ChinaUnix
http://linux.chinaunix.net/bbs/

Ubuntu China
http://forum.ubuntu.org.cn/

Fedora Chinese User Group
http://bbs.fedora-zh.org/index.php

LinuxEDEN
http://bbs.linuxeden.com/

LXDE under Ubuntu 9.04

LXDE is a light weight desktop environment. It is not as full-feature as XFCE and some say it is just a bunch of program around Openbox and PCManfm. But actually there are more and more programs for LXDE and I think it has its place for light weight desktop environment.

LXDE under Ubuntu 9.04 is really very fast. If you are a minimalist and tired of Gnome and KDE and if even XFCE is too big for you, LXDE is worth a try. Apparently Ubuntu 9.04 does not come with the latest XFCE stuffs compared to XFCE's Sourceforge site.

Here is the screenshot with Lxlauncher which you may find similar things with some netbooks.

Xubuntu 9.04 First Impression

I already ran XFCE 4.6 in Ubuntu 8.10. So I installed XFCE under Ubuntu 9.04 and it was quite smooth. Personally I am more at home with Gnome but XFCE seems to be quite functional and responsive.

There is a Chinese Live CD distro based on Xubuntu (along with LXDE) : Hiweed Linux. The 2.0RC version is based on Xubuntu 8.10. Maybe
it should instead be based on 9.04. Hiweed added ibus and ibus-pinyin and some other Chinese addons to Xubuntu.

Screenshot:

Kubuntu 9.04 First Impression

I had not found any really good impressions about KDE for Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) ever since I used 5.04. I have better impressions about KDE since running KDE 4.2.2 under Ubuntu 8.10. But the startup time and logout time are both a bit slow there.

Apparently Kubuntu 9.04 is better. It is noticeably faster than KDE 4.2 under Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 during login/logout and normal operation. So that is a big positive. KDE 4.2 is really quite sleek and beautiful compared to plain Gnome although the smoothness is still not as good as Gnome.

Initially I got no sound when playing MP3, similar to what I met when I installed Arch Linux the first time. The log-in/log-out sound are there. The mixer shows the correct device, just got no sound from other applications. By comparison, Gnome just works without any issues with 9.04, as always even since 5.04 (ok I admit I had some problems with 5.10 initially last time). I had to use Mixer of Gnome to "kick-start" the sound. I got sound but Dragon player still does not work. KDE told me this during after startup that"Notification from Phonon: The audio playback device HDA Nvidia (ALC1200 Analog) does not work. Falling back to default." I checked back the 8.10 installation and actually the problem with Dragon Player was there already.

Overall KDE4.2.2 under Kubuntu 9.04 is actually quite good even though there are occasional stability problem here and there. I will run KDE session more often than last time. Hopefully KDE 4.3 will be even better.

Screenshot:

Ubuntu 9.04 First Impression

Ubuntu 9.04 has just been released. I tested the live session and I was happy with it. So I decided to install it to the harddisk. The installation was very smooth on my Acer M1641 desktop, just like the 8.10 version. The only thing I needed to do was to use the Nvidia proprietary driver instead of the open-source Xorg driver in order to get the full resolution since the open source driver does not support my NForce620i/GeForce7100 well enough.

The first improvement is that the bootup time is quite fast. The second thing is that desktop effects are automatically enabled. Since I do not normally use compiz-fusion, I disabled it.

Then I installed various packages I use (cvs, svn, git, various development related packages, hmm, I am not a developer but I need them to build the packages) and thanks to the fast mirror in Singapore and my 8MB cable modem connection, the process was painless.

I was having problem accessing a share folder from the other XP notebook with my Ubuntu 8.10 installation. 9.04 has no problems accessing that. Unfortunately I still had some performance problem when copying big file under Gnome from the XP share. I had the same problem with my Arch installation. It is about 2-2.2MB/sec. I was getting about 7MB/sec with Fedora 10 under Gnome. This is something to solve later.

Updated on 26-April-2009: Problem Solved. It turns out that the XP notebook has both wireless and wired connection. Taking out the wireless connection and I have now 8.8MB/sec under Gnome and 8.2MB/sec under KDE for Ubuntu 9.04.

Overall the first impression is positive even though there are not really much excitement to mention about. I did notice the new notify-osd feature but I am already running it under Ubuntu 8.10. Running Gnome with Ubuntu is always smooth for me. I have used Ubuntu since 5.04 (April 2005). So far my experiences with Gnome under Ubuntu is quite good.

On the hardware side, the only device not supported is my old analog PCI TV card Compro Videomate X50. It is not supported by v4l (Video for Linux). Anyway, I seldom use it (it works under Vista). But still I decided to blacklist it to shorten the log message.

As for the bundled packages, one of the missing package is ibus-pinyin. Without it, it is not so useful for me to input Chinese. Anyway the version bundled is also an old version, so I will build from the source directly. I like ibus better than scim.

For people who want to use PIC or AVR development, Ubuntu has the packages like gputils/sdcc/piklab and avr-gcc/avrdude. But in general, Ubuntu's built-in version are all a bit too old. So it is better to get the latest released version or even the latest version from cvs/svn/git.

Screenshot:

KDE 4.2 under Arch Linux

After some good impressions with the new Arch Linux installation (with LXDE and XFCE and also Gnome), I decided to give KDE 4.2 a try on Arch Linux. The installation with pacman is easy. The result seems to be better than both Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10.

Now I have a problem with KDE 4.2 under Fedora 10 that console-helper will hang during startup with a dialogbox titled "Query" when I tried to run programs like yumex or other programs which require root access. Logout under Fedora 10 is also very slow compared to others. KDE 4.2 under Ubuntu seems to be a bit more smooth but the login/logout are both a bit slow compared to Gnome.

KDE under Arch seems to better. The logout process is faster than both Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10. Still various program will still come out many warning messages. This is across thee distributions I tried KDE 4.2. So it seems to me KDE 4.2 is not ready for prime time yet. But it is promissing. I did not like KDE 4.1 under Ubuntu 8.10 at all. Nor did I like previous KDE 3.x under Ubuntu. Now KDE 4.2 at least gives me some incentives to try out KDE again after using Gnome since I re-discovered Linux back in 2005 with Ubuntu 5.04. Before that I tried various Linux distros (Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, Caldera, Corel, etc) on-and-off from 1998 to 2002.

XFCE 4.60 for Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04

http://jeromeg.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2009/03/04/Installing-Xfce-4.6-on-Ubuntu-8.04-and-Ubuntu-8.10

This works nicely for me. I was originally trying to use the binary installed but it asked for too many dependencies (development packages).

XFCE 4.60 seems to be much nicer than the previous 4.4.x series which comes with Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04.

On the other hand, I am also trying LXDE, LXDE seems to be much liter than XFCE and quite functional as well.

Nice tips from Ubuntu-Snippets Blog

Nice tips:
1) Print to PDF:
http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/2009/02/enable-print-to-pdf.html

2) UUID
http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/2009/03/uuid-and-partitions.html

There are quite some good tips from this blog. So I will follow it.

Notify-OSD in Ubuntu and Fedora

Notify-OSD (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD) is a nice new feature of the up-coming Ubuntu 9.04.

Launchpad site: https://launchpad.net/notify-osd

Installation instruction for Ubuntu 8.10. Both are okay for me under Ubuntu 8.10.
1. From Alex Rybicki:
http://blog.alexrybicki.com/2009/02/how-to-install-notify-osd-in-intrepid.html
2. From Softpedia:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Installing-Ubuntu-9-04-039-s-New-Notifications-in-Ubuntu-8-10-105221.shtml

I also tried it under Fedora 10 (Gnome and KDE) and it seems to work there as well. There is a bug report for Fedora and hopefully it will get solved soon.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/notify-osd/+bug/351528

I think ease of use is an important feature if Linux wants to get the heart of more users. Features like this are really good to see in Linux distros.

Compiz-fusion under Fedora 10 with Nvidia driver

I was having problems with compiz-fusion under Fedora 10 using the Nvidia 180.19 driver. However compiz-fusion works right out of the box under Ubuntu 8.10 with the restricted driver (177.82) provided by Ubuntu. Even though I do not really care about compiz-fusion effects (usually I tested it and then turned it off), I'd like to troubleshoot the problem.

compiz-check reveals the problem.
http://forlong.blogage.de/entries/pages/Compiz-Check

$ ./compiz-check
Gathering information about your system...

Distribution: Fedora release 10 (Cambridge)
Desktop environment: KDE4
Graphics chip: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7100 / nForce 620i (rev a2)
Driver in use: nvidia
Rendering method: Nvidia

Checking if it's possible to run Compiz on your system...

Checking for texture_from_pixmap... [FAIL]
Checking for non power of two support... [FAIL]
Checking for composite extension... [ OK ]
Checking for FBConfig... [ OK ]
Checking for hardware/setup problems... [SKIP]

At least one check had to be skipped:
Error: Unable to detect maximum 3D texture size

This should not happen. Maybe the driver installation was messed up during kernel updates and rebuilding the kernel modules or installation of other files, so I re-installed the Nvidia driver and viola it works now.

$ ./compiz-check

Gathering information about your system...

Distribution: Fedora release 10 (Cambridge)
Desktop environment: KDE4
Graphics chip: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7100 / nForce 620i (rev a2)
Driver in use: nvidia
Rendering method: Nvidia

Checking if it's possible to run Compiz on your system...

Checking for texture_from_pixmap... [ OK ]
Checking for non power of two support... [ OK ]
Checking for composite extension... [ OK ]
Checking for FBConfig... [ OK ]
Checking for hardware/setup problems... [ OK ]

Ubuntu 8.04: $home/.dmrc file is being ignored

Recently I got this annoying message under Ubuntu 8.04 in the login screen.

Just error message pop-up suggested to "chmod 644 ~/.dmrc" but that does not work. Google shows that others are having the same problem and the solution is the following. This is quite strange.

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/41142

chmod 700 /home/
chmod 644 /home//.dmrc

Fedora 10 First Impression with KDE 4.2

I briefly ran Fedora 9 on my last desktop for three month and it was okay. Then it died and I got the new Acer M1641 desktop and was only running Ubuntu (8.04 and 8.10) along with Windows Vista.

I do not quite like the KDE 4.1 under Ubuntu 8.10 and I saw that Fedora 10 comes with KDE 4.2 now. So I decided to give it a try last week. I happened to find a book in the library with Fedora 10 KDE live CD and DVD inside so this saved me sometime to download the CD or DVD.

The first issue was that the Live CD could not go to X. So I had to use the DVD. It does not boot X either but at least the txt mode worked. This is worse than the Ubuntu 8.10. I had to install the Nvidia driver to get into X. Under Ubuntu 8.10, I can go into X with VESA. Then I just enabled the restricted driver to get me the optimum resolution under Ubuntu.

Once I had the X working I did a full system upgrade using yum.

After that using rpmfusion I installed various program for multimedia. The following guide helps.
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f10.html

Still I find one annoying thing is the new PackageKit. I was hit by the following bug.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=208271

After solving the problem following the solution in the thread, I decided to remove PackageKit related things altogether and use yumex instead. Now I need to manage the updates by myself but at least it is better to be constantly annoyed by the background packagekit process (often you are told that the database is locked by another process when you want to use yum or yumex).

Another bug I met is that switching to Chinese and KDE would hang during log-in process. Later it was solved after some updates.

With the initial bumpy process, now I can enjoying learning to use KDE 4.2 under Fedora 10. I admit I have not used KDE for quite some time. And KDE experiences for me under Ubuntu was not that positive.

Under KDE 4.2, I was not even able to move the button on the panel initially. After switching to "Folder View" and traditional menu, now I feel better with KDE 4.2. There are smb network share related problems with media playing using Mplayer or other players (they tend to copy the whole file before playing under KDE, no problem under Gnome). The suggested solution seems to mount the smb share locally but I do not quite like the solution. Finally it seems VLC works fine with KDE.

All in all, Fedora 10 is not as smooth as Ubuntu 8.10 during the initial stage. But passing that stage, now it runs rather well (both Gnome or KDE). I also tried LXDE and XFCE and both run well. KDE 4.2 now looks fine to me. I still need to learn some new tricks though.

One thing I like Fedora than Ubuntu is the updating policy. Fedora gives you major updates (like KDE 4.2 or the kernel) during the support period but Ubuntu will keep the same old version in the life cycle.