Fitting the battle of life

I’ve blogged before about boot-times and using bootchart to measure them, but back then I was impressed with a 30-second boot. Now, courtesy of the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04, which is due to be released as a final version later this month, I have recorded a 19-second boot – an improvement of just over a third in less than two years (Gutsy, 7.10, to Jaunty, 9.04):

Bootchart for Jaunty, 7th April - click to enlarge

It’s not instant-on, but it’s an improvement nonetheless where prior experience of upgrades has been to expect more bloat and slower loading times. On four-year old hardware, no less. My ancient laptop has 512MB of RAM and a 1.83GHz, single-core processor, and yet manages to put at least Vista to shame.

So, here’s a big thank you to all Ubuntu developers, whether working for Canonical (or, indeed, upstream) or as part of the wider community. You rock my world.

Well, it’s that time in Ubuntu’s 6-month release cycle that I update my old laptop to the latest beta release, and that now is Jaunty – Ubuntu 9.04.

Everything that worked fine under Hardy (8.10) still works fine – indeed, I feel it’s all a bit speedier. The only bootchart I’ve generated so far gives a boot time of just over a minute, but I think that’s partly because it was trying to run a disk check as well. Resuming from hibernate, however, is lightning quick (although the first time it decided to fail to resume and booted normally, which wasn’t much of an issue as I had no work open).

The only problem I’ve had, which I would assume is because I’ve done a fresh install rather than an upgrade, is the performance of my Dell 720 Printer, which used to work flawlessly using Lexmark drivers originally intended for Red Hat. Now, however, following the same instructions I have before, there seems to be a problem, and by seems to be, I mean there is: I can’t print.

I know this is something to do with CUPS, but I have little time spare to look into it in much detail. My first final-year exam is later this month, and the last one almost a month later. It’s mostly annoying because there’s no support for the same printer on a Mac, which is my other laptop at the moment. Oh well – it might act as incentive for me to actually go to the library.

Just thought I’d hilight one of the Ubuntu Open Week sessions I attended yesterday, a very informative and useful talk from Tony Whitmore of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast on Media Production using Ubuntu. You can read the log here. It was a good overview of the apps you might need to produce video, photography and audio using open source – well worth a read if you have ten mins or any interest in multimedia.

I like surprises. I’m not following the build-up to the release of Ubuntu 8.10 very closely (having far more pressing things like writing 3,000 words on books I’ve not yet read), so when some of those minor little changes occur they sometimes make me smile.

I found this after a few updates today:

New background for Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10)

(The updated themes caused me a couple of issues to start with, but it all got ironed out. Seems Ubuntu forgot which theme it was meant to be using and switched to a horrible grey boxy thing. Ewww.)

There are quite a few photos I like to use as backgrounds, but this is the kind of look I will probably keep for a while.

So, I have a lovely modern shiny laptop that is underpowered with too little storage (hey, it was free from these guys for winning their competition) and a three-year old laptop that makes my room noiser than [text deleted by the PC brigade]. I also have a fscking awesome wonderful new camera (a Canon 450D) that’s producing rather large RAW files that need processing.

I don’t, unfortunately, have much money. The shiny laptop was free, the old laptop a birthday present and the camera also a birthday present. In January, however, I get a nice chunk of student loan in again, and I am working during term so I can save up a little cash.

The problem to solve is, I would quite like to buy a desktop PC for a) working at home on a machine that’s not ridiculously tiny and bad for my fingers to be typing on, b) a nice large screen to see my nice large photos, c) a computer that’s powerful enough to process said photos and d) that isn’t too expensive.

At the moment my decision is between a £799 iMac (because they’re supposed to be good for that kind of thing) and a comparable Dell running Ubuntu (because I like Ubuntu and can do everything for two different values of free with GIMP and ufraw instead of acquiring buying Lightroom/Aperture/Photoshop etc). I haven’t ever had a desktop of my own, and am not really sure I know what I’m looking for. Any suggestions, tips or warnings (and hatemail for the iMac comment), please do let me know down there in the comment box. I won’t be buying until the New Year, but it would be good to have an idea of what I’m looking for before I start looking!

[Updated]:

Dell computer:
Looking at Dell’s site, I can get a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 gig RAM, 320GB hard drive with 128MB ATI card for £310. Monitor I’d buy separately – could probably get cheaper, as with wireless adaptor. Add another, larger hard drive myself, and I’m sorted. Does that sound good enough?

I upgraded my old laptop to Ubuntu 8.10 pretty much as soon as the beta was announced – and why not? My experience of the Hardy beta was pretty good, no major bugs or nuffin’.

At the moment I’m rarely using that laptop so I can’t give it a good thorough review (although I have a few things to say about Ubuntu/Linux in a while), but here are my vague impressions.

Theme

The new dark human theme is pretty attractive:

In my book, any change that helps define Ubuntu as apart from other distros and OSs is a good move. (Why people use themes that look identical to Vista or OS X is beyond me.) I don’t like the defauly background as much as I did the Heron one, but it fits nicely anyway.

There is one flaw I can see so far, however: big white spaces just don’t seem to work with dark themes.

It’s not exactly a perfect theme quite yet, but I’m sure (read: hope) these things are tweaked before final release.

Breakages

I’ve had one minor breakage in the short time I’ve been using Intrepid – no keystrokes seemed to register, and I could only click on certain things. Applications/Places/System drop-down menus would hilight, but not drop down. Luckily, this seemed to resolve itselve with a log-out and log-back-in-again. Apart from that, all seems to be working perfectly under the hood.

Hibernate

One of the issues I’ve had before with this laptop is that hibernate/suspend didn’t work perfectly, and took quite a while to resume. Under Intrepid? Perfect. Good job developers!

Overall

As I said, these are only very initial impressions – basically limited to what it looks like and using it to write and print one sheet of A4 and be on IRC. That said, I like it. I like where it’s headed – away from a slightly immature look (all that Windows 3.1 grey muddled in with a not-very-attractive brown) and towards its own signature style (I am particularly impressed with window title bars – swish!).

So, congratulations to everyone who’s been working on or contributing to it, and I look forward to the end of the month and the release itself!

This is a bit late, and I apologise. I apologise also for the lack of photos – there’s a very good reason I forgot to take more, and it’s to do with the beer, and all the kind kind folks (Daviey, Popey, Kirrus and a couple of others) who bought me beer. In addition to the few I got myself.

(There is one photograph that has been censored and is not available to view. The person responsible knows who he is!)

Anyway – the night was great, the people friendly and the cake delicious. Now, if only I could remember more of what happened, that would be awesome! It’s a shame Popey and Daviey were not in a, er, able state to record any interviews for the podcast, but I’m sure it’s probably best they didn’t. The Canonical peeps were all really good fun to chat to, and the rest of the community I met (including Wubi guy, who has made it a lot easier for Windows-types to try Ubuntu out), were all fantastic.

Bring on Intrepid Ibex and more Belgian beers!

You know, I’ve had enough of Ubuntu. I realised today that I feel guilty.

Even as a student, I’m expected to get things on cheap. Sainsburys basics food, cheap pints at the Union, that kind of thing. But the thing is, however cheap we students get, we never sink so low as to take something for free. It’s an unwritten rule: if it’s free, it’s wrong. You’re probably stealing. And stealing’s a Bad Thing, trademark.  (To say nothing of the patent issue…)

Ubuntu may looks shiny and be fully functional. But a Jaguar is shiny and fully functional as well. Don’t see me just taking one of those without paying for it, do you?

No, Ubuntu is making me feel guilty. I want cheap computing, not stolen computing. Today I am going to back up all my documents (taking care to re-save all my odt files back into doc format), find my old XP install disk, and blast Ubuntu off my computer. Mark today in your diaries: it’s when I start going clean.

jerichokb, 1/4/08

Well, the pwn to own contest has come to an end, and after the early exit of the MacBook Air, the Vista laptop was the second to go, leaving the Ubuntu machine still standing at the end.

It’s not a particularly scientific contest – I’m sure the Air went first because it was a more desirable prize than the Vista laptop, but the fact that the Ubuntu machine ‘won’ doesn’t surprise me, and probably doesn’t surprise anyone else either. The Mac succumbed to a flaw in Safari, and the Vista machine apparently a flaw in Adobe’s flash player.

There are security vulnerabilities in Ubuntu – or there would never be security updates – but for the moment, we’re safe.

Following up from my first impressions, I’m now on beta 3 (which comes as default in the Hardy beta), and noticing a few more features I’m really impressed with.

First up is better download management. It was good to begin with, but there’s now a quick-look indicator in the status bar so you can keep track of how everything’s going without bringing up the download window:

The new download window itself has been revamped, but I don’t like having to right-click to clear the list – having a separate button was much more intuitive. I suppose that with the ’search’ box as well, the developers were aiming for a google-esque archiving everything you’ve ever downloaded feature, but it doesn’t really float my boat.

It may just be the slightly tweaked Hardy icon set, but I’ve noticed some tiny icon changes, specifically dealing with rss feed icons, which look slicker if a little bigger to my eye (can’t compare as I’m on a clean install of Hardy). Shots of both the address bar and live bookmark icons:

Finally, the new Add-ons dialogue is a great idea, letting you search for extensions without opening up another tab, but in my first test didn’t perform that well. Still, it’s a neat feature to have:

That’s about it for now, will do another update when it moves out of beta.