Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.10/

by Uncle_Sam • 16 years ago

128 117 16 years ago

releases.ubuntu.com

mseebach• 16 years ago

Slightly more relevant link: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta#New%20features%2...

mgunes5• 16 years ago

That's slightly outdated, as it's the beta page. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/TechnicalOverview reflects the latest state of things.

someone_here2• 16 years ago

This release uses a new interface font, which is the first major OS (that I know of, anyways) to not use a Helvetica-like font for their GUI. Mark Shuttleworth talks about the decision and impact on his blog: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/537

retube• 16 years ago

screenshots: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/09/ubuntu-1010-maverick-meerkat-...

bruceD2• 16 years ago

Release candidate screenshots: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/09/ubuntu-1010-maverick-meerkat-...

cpach2• 16 years ago

Oh, nice to see a light, pale theme, like in Mac OS. It's much easier on the eyes, at least for me.

thvdburgt• 16 years ago

The asymmetrical upper case T annoys me.

bruceD2• 16 years ago

The font is available on the CD, but it has not been set as default (and it might not be default in the final release either).

mgunes5• 16 years ago

It will most likely be default for everything other than monospace and document fonts.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-artwork/+bu...

dchest• 16 years ago

How's Lucida Grande Helvetica-like?

fluidcruft• 16 years ago

Macintosh prior to OSX used Chicago and Charcoal. These are fairly distinctive and aren't really "Helvetica-like" in my mind. Chicago in particular was pretty much synonymous with "Macintosh" and was used in early iPods. Pre-MacOS machines used fixed-width bitmapped fonts that fall more in the range of "programmer fonts" than Helvetica.

someone_here2• 16 years ago

Nifty. I would have been 9 at the time :)

LoonyPandora• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "Helvetica-like". OS X Uses Lucida Grande as a system font, which is quite different to Helvetica (Lucida Grande == Humanist, Helvetica == Neo Grotesque)

I can't vouch for Windows, but if memory serves it's system font is also a humanist style.

jdub• 16 years ago

Practically every Linux distro uses DejaVu Sans (previously Bitstream Vera Sans), which is not Helvetica-like. Windows and OS X don't use Helvetica-like fonts either.

I think you might be smoking an Arial hash pipe... because Helvetica is clearly too good for you! :-)

Mizza• 16 years ago

My friend made this: Compare: Ubuntu font overlaid on Verdana and LiberationSans:

http://i.imgur.com/51jao.png

sandGorgon4• 16 years ago

On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed.

Bug 568711 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711)... particularly nasty because it is a confirmed bug in suspend/resume that has a lot of people being affected by it - but has been relegated to medium severity and is currently unassigned.

moxiemk1• 16 years ago

It seems highly improbably that the people working on fonts and design would otherwise be working on suspend/resume.

Medium severity sounds right for a bug that only affects users with certain hardware. High severity should be reserved for things with a wider impact, or else it loses its meaning.

sandGorgon4• 16 years ago

ordinarily I would agree, but there are a LOT of affected users with suspend/resume problems. Now, it might be statistically true that there are exponentially more people who are working on desktops - but there are an insignificant number of people using Ubuntu on laptops.

Why this bug is particularly significant is that the bug affects people with across very different hardware configurations, manufacturer and model.

Still, I grant that I do not know how does one figure out the issues with wider impact: but this particular one has 77 people marked on the "affects me" list. That is not an insignificant number (not the total number of people affected, but rather who bothered to search the tracker and then file a bug)

dkarl5• 16 years ago

The number of users affected is unknown, but the list of laptops mentioned in that thread is pretty varied, and it makes Ubuntu unusable for those folks.

I know OSS needs to be more attentive to aesthetics, but let's not forget that "Ew, I just can't STAND these fonts" is a different kind of unusable from "I tried six obscure workarounds listed in a bug report, but none worked, so I installed a different OS." Using a laptop exclusively as one's primary computer is extremely common these days. If showstopper bugs are tolerated on laptops, the perception of Linux viability for non-tinkerers is going to regress back to five or ten years ago when it was common to encounter bugs like this in a desktop install.

lg• 16 years ago

fwiw, all these laptop issues (especially this suspend/resume bug after I upgraded to Hardy) were what convinced me to get a mac. The only people I know with problem-free linux systems are desktop users.

FooBarWidget• 16 years ago

Suspend/resume has been broken in various ways on various hardware for years. This makes me wonder whether they're bugs in Linux or bugs in hardware for which each one requires a different workaround. In case of the latter I can imagine why things stay broken for such a long time.

motters• 16 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Slightly tweaked fonts aren't the highest of priorities.

fierarul• 16 years ago

Fonts were the most ugly part of Linux by far to me and the reason I bought an iBook long ago. The other reason was perfect hardware support so I could suspend / resume properly.

I don't expect Canonical to support all the hardware in the world, but everybody stares at the OS font all day long.

carlrice2• 16 years ago

Smoothing and proper metrics were default in 9.04+ and before that accessible via a GUI interface for manual tweaking. Replacing FreeSans with a well tailored family is just finishing the job (so you don't have to.)

lars512• 16 years ago

Fonts have been getting better, but the first thing I do is to load up a new install with fonts imported from OS X and Windows. I find these improve the attractiveness of the desktop greatly.

jbarham2• 16 years ago

> I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right

FWIW I tried to install Ubuntu on my wife's laptop and the main thing that made her go back to Windows was the look of the fonts. So I think Canonical is right to focus on polishing up things that can attract non-technical users.

sandGorgon4• 16 years ago

you're absolutely right - but ugly fonts were fixable even previously. I used Droid or even Calibri from my Windows 7 install.

I dont think there have been any changes in font rendering itself (which is the main cause of Linux fonts looking bad compared to Win7 or OSX) - rather, just a new font.

But suspend/resume ? I just cant fix it - it is so bad that I have started believing in Linux suspend/resume being sentient (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613621)

old-gregg3• 16 years ago

This is shocking to me. Windows font rendering isn't even close to what Ubuntu-packaged cairo/freetype is capable of, especially on high-DPI screens. Or perhaps she didn't like the fonts themselves? In that case you could have copied a bunch of Windows fonts, for instance Consolas looks absolutely gorgeous under FreeType.

I applaud Ubuntu for their font efforts. They were the first distro to package non-crippled FreeType (main reason why so many people believed that "linux fonts are ugly"). Thanks to Canonical, mainstream Linux now has the best font rendering of the 3 by far (windows/osx/linux).

benmccann• 16 years ago

What version did you try? I found that 10.04 was the first version with fonts that actually look good.

isb• 16 years ago

My wife wants to switch to windows because certain basic things just don't work in a multi-user/fast-user-switching Ubuntu setup. The wireless applet (nm-applet) is plain broken (bug 284596). Audio doesn't work if the previously logged-in user was playing something. Some of these problems have been known for a while.

amackera2• 16 years ago

Fixed link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711

acabal3• 16 years ago

Agreed. Shuttleworth & co seem more interested in tweaking visual desktop stuff (window buttons, windicators, indicator applet, etc.) than actually making sure their software is as bug-free as possible. Every time I upgrade to the newest release (literally every single upgrade since Hardy, when I started using Ubuntu) a bunch of stuff that used to work breaks. Lucid hasn't been as bad as others (Jaunty and Karmic I'm looking at you) but it's not without its problems. And I'm running a 5-year old laptop here.

I know it's hard to control quality on a desktop sourced from thousands of individual/independent contributors, but Canonical would do well to put money into their QA department to ensure release-to-release stability instead of into their design department--which for the most part seems to be a Shuttleworth cargo-cult dictatorship anyway.

carlrice2• 16 years ago

I hear ya, but these things are just as important. Poor user experience is a bug and graphical tweaks and updating the indicator platform was much needed. I will admit windicators, multitouch and head tracking parallax should take low priority, but most of their designers wouldn't be fixing driver bugs if they weren't turning up the pretty.

With the latest stable 10.04 I have had very little trouble if any. Granted I am on a ThinkPad. When I ran it on a Macbook Pro and its slightly tweaked "standard" hardware it ran like crap and took a lot of coaxing to get up and running until I just gave up and got the right hardware for the job.

count• 16 years ago

They seem to be doing pretty well focusing on what they've been focusing on - end user experience.

They didn't go from nothing to #1 for no reason, you know.

Calling it a cargo-cult dictatorship is a bit unfair as well - he's footing the bill for a huge chunk of the work, why shouldn't he get a say? Nothing's stopping you from ponying up and starting your own distro dev team; you can even fork from Ubuntu and just fix the thing's you think they're lacking.

We'll see who gets more user mindshare...

amackera2• 16 years ago

On a related note, why do fonts look so terrible? Surely it's not just a lack of decent, free, typefaces? FreeType is unencumbered by bytecode hinting patents as of May 2010. The only other patent (according to http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html) is a Microsoft algorithm for color filtering for subpixel rendering (which, according to the page, is circumvented by using a different color filter).

rbanffy• 16 years ago

> that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed.

Well... It works for me - Acer Aspire One 251, Dell E4300 and HP dv6xxx. Windows never got suspend/resume right neither on the Dell nor the HP. I never used the Acer under Windows, so, I am not sure if it worked or not.

It would be useful, regarding this bug, if people with functioning machines chimed in with lshw listings so a failure pattern, if there is one, could be determined.

kamme• 16 years ago

Try to look at it this way: You're a user and your resume/suspend on your laptop doesn't work, you file a bug report and are mad it wasn't fixed ASAP. If I was a sysadmin and there was a bug in Ubuntu that would crash apache every 3 nights, I would file a bug report and be mad if it wasn't fixed ASAP. If I was a designer and I found the colors on the screen where totally off, I would file a bug report and be mad if it wasn't fixed ASAP.

I hope you see the point.

Everybody's problem is 'critical', but you just have to accept it doesn't work that way. Everything depends on context, but please think a moment about this: resources are limited, time is precious and getting 'fed up with things' rarely helps. Want to change things? Feel free to look at other issues and see if you find a solution, if you do, fix it and be part of the people who change stuff for the better.

xpaulbettsx• 16 years ago

I understand that it's open-source and a lot of the work is volunteer, but man - they ship with known bugs that as a Windows OS dev I'm pretty shocked. Like, if this was some chipset from 1995 that'd be okay, but this is the chipset in like > 70% of today's laptops afaik.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

About 6 months to a year ago, the (geek) headlines were FULL of articles lambasting Ubuntu's fonts. I agree, it seems kind of trivial to me, but apparently it REALLY, REALLY matters to some people, more than anything else.

patrickaljord• 16 years ago

> On the other hand, I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right, that critical aspects like suspend/resume are broken, but not fixed.

You do know that a company can work on more than one thing at a time, right?

metachris• 16 years ago

I'm glad that the Maverick Meerkat EC2 images(1) are working great. In the latest Lucid Lynx image (24.9.) as well as in the updates for the previous ones they introduced a nasty bug(2) causing a phantom load of 100% on one CPU. No fix in sight yet; this was really annoying. In my experiments so far, Maverick Meerkat works just great!

[1] http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/releases/

[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/574910

mgunes5• 16 years ago

The RC has not actually been released. Various news sites are reporting it prematurely to get extra traffic as usual, and the Ubuntu Release Team would like people to wait [1] for the official release announcement, which will be posted to the release blog [2] , and the ubuntu-announce mailing list [3].

[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/09/ubuntu-10-10-release-cand...

[2] http://release-blog.ubuntu.com

[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

illumen• 16 years ago

It has now :)

olalonde2• 16 years ago

Is it possible to upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 without reinstalling the whole OS?

Tichy• 16 years ago

It should be? What gives you reason to think it isn't possible?

olalonde2• 16 years ago

Just asking since I've only been using Ubuntu for a few weeks.

sigzero• 16 years ago

I don't think he means "technically" possible. I think he just mean "How can I?".

div• 16 years ago

Should be possible via update-manager soon enough. Even major upgrades (6.04 -> 7.04 etc) have been possible for a year or two at least.

nuclear_eclipse2• 16 years ago

Minor niggle: it was 6.06; they delayed that release by two months in preparation for their very first LTS release.

leftnode• 16 years ago

Yeah, of course.

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

mgunes5• 16 years ago

That's an unsupported upgrade method. Please issue "update-manager -d" in a desktop install, or "do-release-upgrade -d" on a server or other command line environment.

tolini• 16 years ago

Ok, my previous comment ("Who cares?") seemed to be thoughtless or even offensive (~15 downvotes in 5 minutes), and I have to acknowledge that it lacked quite some arguments.

So let me ask: why does this news deserve so much attention to stand in front of HN? What interesting innovation, except the GUI, has brought this new OS release? Is an OS all about GUI and look & feel?

Generally speaking, I am just fed up with all this thoughtless media attention.

weego• 16 years ago

"Is an OS all about GUI and look & feel?"

Considering 95% of the world don't care about anything but how something looks and whether they can interact with it in a way that makes sense I would suggest that it is, to a large degree.

They also need a good foundation of course but too often do people in the OSS communities confuse having a solid foundation with having a winning product.

sandGorgon4• 16 years ago

Generally related to the UI, but from a technology viewpoint - this release will use Freetype 2.4 which is the first released that is not patent encumbered by Apple or Microsoft (all those patents expired in May)

Though Ubuntu has always shipped with the patent encumbered stuff turned on, but I think we are going to see some interesting innovation in font rendering going forward.

aphexairlines• 16 years ago

I don't think it's on the front page because 10.10 is innovative. It's on the front page because it's Ubuntu, which is popular among HN linux users.

niels_olson2• 16 years ago

One thing I like about the bi-annual Ubuntu announcements is that it has provided a sort of mental metronome for the pace of development, and a moment to reflect on when, exactly, I did I last update those servers?

whyworryagain• 16 years ago

Can I dual boot ubuntu on my mac? I am looking to get a mac to replace my netbook.

stanleydrew• 16 years ago

I am, but it hasn't been particularly great. There are some hardware issues, mostly surrounding audio and multiple monitors, that I haven't experienced when running Ubuntu on other machines.

xorglorb• 16 years ago

Strange, Lucid works great without any problems on my Macbook Pro 6,2.

What model are you running?

cdr• 16 years ago

The dual booting part should be painless, but as stanleydrew noted you may encounter problems with hardware support in Ubuntu.

nagrom• 16 years ago

Given the maturity of the software, there's no reason not just to run a virtualbox on Mac OS X with Ubuntu inside it. It's a hell of a lot easier than messing around with the partitions on your hard drive and worrying about hardware support. Unless you do very intensive real time work on the linux install, it's almost unnoticeable from a performance viewpoint.

yason• 16 years ago

This is the first time I haven't found a human-readable summary anywhere of the new features and major changes of the upcoming Ubuntu version. They used to have this but now their release pages just point to a list of ~250 blueprints which doesn't constitute a "human-readable summary".

Can someone help, please?

mgunes5• 16 years ago

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MaverickMeerkat/TechnicalOverview

u489982• 16 years ago

I hate Ubuntu, there is no support for it. Tried it twice already. They need to go back to the drawing board.

rfugger• 16 years ago

An overview of support options, which are mainly free:

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

If you need live human support for a consumer desktop system, you can purchase it on a yearly basis:

http://www.canonical.com/consumer-services/support

u489982• 16 years ago

I wish to use Ubuntu because I have slightly older hardware, but if it renders youtube video in slow motion and if I see tons of similar complaints on the internet, than what good is an operating system competing with Microsoft which isn't even working well right out of the box?

Everyone seems to be getting greedy for updated hardware and operating systems. I don't really care to upgrade my hardware every two years. If Ubuntu cannot deliver without fastest processor and video memory, than they might as well just start selling to corporate and be done with the free stuff.

rufugee2• 16 years ago

Um....ok. At my day job pay roughly $150 a year to Canonical for support. I don't really need it, mind you, as most of the time the system operates as expected. However, it was a way to give a little back to a company who has done a lot for Linux over the years.

I have used it on occasion, and aside from the rather crappy salesforce interface they're using to track cases, it works very well. The responses are quick and the engineers are very knowledgeable.

makeramen• 16 years ago

Their power management is the only thing keeping me away at this moment. Right now Win7 is getting almost double the battery life on my laptop.

Ubuntu boot times are impeccable though.

weel• 16 years ago

Works fine for me already.

mohammedsk• 16 years ago

I also gave up on Ubuntu. I had Dell D800 and Ubuntu was working just fine including suspend/hibernate. Now I got a new ASUS, where suspend/hibernate does not work. I decided to stick with Windows 7, it is more reliable for me when it comes to that issue. Although, I miss Ubuntu, for me it is a much better OS. Hopefully on day, before I am dead, they will fix this issue.

Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Release Candidate

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