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Saturday, March 31, 2012

Ubuntu 12.04 beta 2 my views

I am curious to see what Ubuntu 12.04 offers and downloaded the 64 bit livecd.

Here are my views

I feel Ubuntu 12.04 is elegant, so elegant that fine details are well taken care of. Fonts are beautiful, opening of apps are very fast and consistent, internet is very fast, sound works.

one sentence Attention to details comes to my mind

Unity is for the first time so elegant that it does not annoy with hiding left side menu. Of course it can be made hidden using system settings from the right corner but would I ?



Kernel used in beta is still 3.2 which can be seen after giving uname -a in terminal



Pressing Microsoft Windows hotkey brings a nice translucent onscreen search. There is a white maximize in the top left corner which on pressing zooms this onscreen to fullscreen. Selecting small beautiful icons further takes us deep into all applications, that is if we dont want to type in the search box


Press and hold windows hotkey brings an elegant popup which shows all unity shortcuts


Unity menu icons on right clicking pops up a very beautiful menu


Alt tab and it launches a switcher between apps and releasing just tab and holding alt on the app brings all its instances, so elegant. Clicking on the app icon in unity bar does the same but a bit differently

Alt + Tab (release tab and hold alt shows all instances of selected app and releasing alt switches to the instance)


Clicking on unity icon shows all instances of the app



System settings is having a surprise icon which intrigued me, Privacy



sounded like firefox privacy settings and got very curious to know what it is


Shows a button to stop recording activity, does it mean my desktop activities are recorded?


What kind of files and actions are recorded which can be opted out (but only if we take care to tick the right boxes!!)


Apps activities are logged, unless it is added into the opt out list, clever I would say as it is pain to add an ignore list. Will it record only if we opt in, but who would care to do so?


on pressing Privacy policy  takes to Ubuntu privacy policy and what it collects as anonymous data



Again back to unity workspace switcher, just pressing it brings this gorgeous 4 screen thumbnail


And all apps are standard, firefox for internet, rhythmbox for music, thunderbird for email, libreoffice ...



Office is libreoffice and a screenshot of that




Menus don't show by default and on moving mouse to the top panel brings the menu of the active application. And menu is merged with the panel which is called Global Menu (available from previous Ubuntu I guess ...)

Libreoffice does not respect global menus, which mars the consistency of Unity



Is there a synaptic package manager, by default no, an apt-get away, I would say


Ubuntu Software Center removes the need for synaptic (of course I would install synaptic package manager from it ... as I can't see what is happening when I try to install something)


Ubuntu software center, tries to show ads, looks more like a news magazine ... than a software center



Trying to search synaptic and I ended up with a search results screen, where the behaviour is quite inconsistent, one time there is no button to install/buy, select next result and click or go back and come to results, it shows one time as install, one time as buy. Also tries to sell Ubuntu Practical Guide



Is that a pdf ? or epub, did not dig further ...

coming back to synaptic buy/install



Selecting more info prompts to use universe source


Isn't it odd to see a buy button for Synaptic Package Manager.

Trying to give Ctrl + Alt + F1 brings virtual console in live cd mode (well it is not live cd but live usb). Was not getting that in installed Ubuntu 11.10, yet to try installing it


All the Ubuntu 12.04 iso are hybrid images and can be written to usb/pendrives using dd command

this is how I wrote Ubuntu 12.04 to a pendrive which was in /dev/sdd

sudo dd if=ubuntu-12.04-beta2-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=4M

sync

see above I have used /dev/sdd instead of /dev/sdd1

If you write to some pendrive do not suffix with an index which is partition number, make sure to give the correct pendrive device and without any numeral suffix. Also no partition of the pendrive should be mounted for this to work. After sync I rebooted from pendrive

There is a way to change theme from Radiance to Ambiance, change launcher icon size and wallpapers, beautiful




A beautiful pen wallpaper, and I summarize what I felt with a pen image!

Saturday, March 24, 2012

openSUSE 12.1

After trying to keep up with Ubuntu and unity wanted to see a change

and installed openSUSE 12.1



I want to try Tumbleweed in openSUSE

Update: openSUSE 12.1 is mindblowing and I am enjoying my computer like anything than before. Here are my views, audio is very sharp, amarok playing in the background is a nice touch.

I added packman repository and whenever I tried to play mp3 or movie, suse offered a dialog box to install some codecs and I clicked ok for everything, :)

Bringing nvidia is piece of cake with nvidia community repository and with all KDE effects, it makes me kneel down to suse.

I thought ubuntu was very good in audio and opensuse with this much sound clarity is stunning