Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Wednesday 29 April 2009, 2:29 PM
Ubuntu Jaunty - Positive and Negative
On the positive side, the release notes say that they improved handling of multiple displays, and they really have done that. This is something that has been important to me, because of the way that I use my primary laptop, for quite some time now. In Ubuntu, it has basically gone from not working very well (or at all) in 8.04, to working quite well in 8.10, and now to working extremely well in 9.04. I have tried it with both my Lifebook S6510 (Intel 965 display controller) and my Lifebook S2110 (ATI Radeon Xpress 200 display controller), and both of them handle two displays, not mirrored, just fine.
On the negative side, I'm not terribly pleased with the way the Ubuntu Update Manager works with the new notification system. When there are updates available, all that happens is that I get a very brief flash of a window on the screen, which immediately minimizes (disappears from the display and is only present in the panel icons). There are plenty of ways that I can not see that window flash past, ranging from simply not paying attention, to not even being at the screen when it happens. Now, add to that the fact that I always auto-hide the panels, so I don't see it down there right away either. The result is, I'm not aware that there are updates available until I shut down, when the Update Manager window once again flashes onto the screen briefly before the screen goes blank. It seems to me that the obvious solution is that the Update Manager window should stay open, rather than iconify, but I can't find anywhere to set this.
Anyway the bottom line is, if the only thing I have to complain about after a week of use is something as trivial as this, Ubuntu 9.04 looks like a very solid release.
jw 29/4/2009
PreviousComments on this post
If you want to restore the pre-Jaunty mode of update notifications, run this command in the terminal (or navigate accordingly with the Configuration Editor: apps > update-notifier > auto_launch)...
gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
:)
Regarding the update notification, I just thought my computer was playing up. I have, in fact, updated the Beta online, as and when updates were issued, and this strange behaviour only started recently.
Nothing like being confused!
Thanks for the tip, Gnothi.
Moley, I'm not certain but I think that automatic online updates were disabled in the Jaunty Betas. At least, on all three of the systems I was using it I never got update availability notifications, I had to manually start Online Update and check for them. That made sense to me, because there were a lot of updates coming down the pipes for a while, and some of them were potentially destabilizing, so I assumed Canonical was playing it safe and making it easier for someone to just try the incremental Alpha, Beta and RC releases, without having to deal with updates. Needless to say, with the final release the automatic notification system is once again active.
Gnothi, thanks very much for the tip. I might try it - but maybe not, because although I'm not terribly pleased with the way the Update Manager works with the new notification system, I think the system itself is good, and is a nice improvement. I'm going to leave it alone for at least a little while, and see how I get on with it.
jw
I never accept automatic updates of anything. I want to have a look at what is going to change first, especially if there is the chance that config. files might be 'updated' :(
