Ubuntu 8.10

fishfishfish · 31 Oct 2008 at 19:08

I highly recommend if you have an LCD panel for you to go to Preferences > Appearance > Fonts > Select subpixel smoothing (LCDs). It makes the text much clearer.

Yep, totally agree. The subpixel smoothing option on Intrepid is much improved and the difference is very striking.

If you break X, don't forget that there's also the recovery mode option. When the machine boots you should see a line in the GRUB list which says recovery mode, or similar. Select that and boot the machine and you'll get a screen which has a menu including Xfix. Running this should reconfigure the X server that controls the graphics. It might not be the perfect resolution, but it should get you into graphical mode so you can tweak it some more.

Hamster · 31 Oct 2008 at 19:51

squawkBOX said:
I highly recommend if you have an LCD panel for you to go to Preferences > Appearance > Fonts > Select subpixel smoothing (LCDs). It makes the text much clearer.

Big difference!! Thanks for the tip

BusError · 31 Oct 2008 at 20:06

I use Kubuntu, but I really don't want kde4, it's crap ! So I'll hold off uograding to 8.10 until either kde4 evolves and start working as good as 3.5... or until I (oh horror) switch to gnome...

OCdude · 31 Oct 2008 at 20:12

Weird problem..... booting with the liveCD... loads the desktop.. cursor is there... then...... nothing! CD stops spinning and it does nadda...

If i choose to install... it pretty much does the same thing :S

MD5 checked out okay on the ISO (haven't verified the CD yet, but im sure it's okay..)

Anyone else experienced this before?

craptakular · 31 Oct 2008 at 21:42

OCdude said:
Weird problem..... booting with the liveCD... loads the desktop.. cursor is there... then...... nothing! CD stops spinning and it does nadda...

If i choose to install... it pretty much does the same thing :S

MD5 checked out okay on the ISO (haven't verified the CD yet, but im sure it's okay..)

Anyone else experienced this before?

I got a white screen on death with my 4870. Upon booting when it says press esc to enter the menu, do that and try the safe graphical mode, it worked for me.

Hamster · 31 Oct 2008 at 21:46

BusError said:
I use Kubuntu, but I really don't want kde4, it's crap ! So I'll hold off uograding to 8.10 until either kde4 evolves and start working as good as 3.5... or until I (oh horror) switch to gnome...

Is there no way of upgrading to 8.10 but keeping KDE 3.5?

Outcast · 31 Oct 2008 at 23:15

I fixed the Virtualbox error I had.

My fault.. I didn't RTFM !!

On looking in sources.list I never had the entry they told me to enter !!

ie:

Code:

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian hardy non-free

Job sorted !!
Same with Ktorrent.

nice tip about the sub font rendering too. + rep for you.

BusError · 1 Nov 2008 at 12:59

JoeMama said:
Is there no way of upgrading to 8.10 but keeping KDE 3.5?

No I don't think do; the KDE4 is now the 'official' one. They even mention that KDE4 had 'shortcomings' and that you might want to stick to the 8.04.

It's really totaly silly. KDE have been trying to 'copy' windoze since day one, even the stuff nobody wants at all ! Here in that case they wanted to look crap like Vista, and in the process, throw away what made it a good working environment. For a few silly eye candy bits.

If I want eye-candy, I wouldn't boot into linux !

Berserker · 1 Nov 2008 at 13:27

-Tauren- said:
ive been using it since the betas, and everything is perfect. although they havent got rid of the head parking issue for my laptop drive, i dont care. lol, ive got back ups

Could you explain this parking issue - just so I can be confident I don't have it. A dead brand new HDD wouldn't be good.

Also, if anyone has any info about this 'seamless RDP', I'd be interested. Sorry for such a n00b question but I don't have time to keep up-to-date with these things, sadly.

Might give this a try in a few weeks - I usually let everyone else find the bugs first.

Minto · 1 Nov 2008 at 15:11

anyone working on a wired lan might find that the network-manager has problems - it did for me, you have to change /etc/network/interfaces, and add the following lines;

Code:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

where eth0 is the interface in question
hope that helps someone

Mobius 1 · 1 Nov 2008 at 15:29

Berserker said:
Could you explain this parking issue - just so I can be confident I don't have it. A dead brand new HDD wouldn't be good.

Also, if anyone has any info about this 'seamless RDP', I'd be interested. Sorry for such a n00b question but I don't have time to keep up-to-date with these things, sadly.

Might give this a try in a few weeks - I usually let everyone else find the bugs first.

when the hard drive parks, it parks due to inactivity and activity i believe, so if you dropped your laptop you head would be parked and no damage would occur, but the parking rate in ubuntu is rather high on some drives. mine used to park every 3 seconds in 8.04, and i would hear a clicking noise, where the head kept parking (because of harsh power management, my drive is eco friendly or something). im not sure what caused the issue, but it seems to have been dulled down now in 8.10. basically what you're looking out for is a clicking noise from your HDD, you'll notice it as soon as you install it. a typical hard drive has a 600,000 park limit. mine is only on 9000 so i dont really have anything to worry about just yet..

see how it goes, but if you find yourself in the same boat as me you can apply an ugly fix. im not sure if it works in intrepid though.

Berserker · 1 Nov 2008 at 16:08

Fair enough. Yes, it's possible I had that problem as I swapped the drive for something new.

Rather scarily, the drive in my 9-month-old laptop (running Windows Vista) is showing a load cycle count of 171,628, which is rather scary, but it's not going up very fast fortunately. Might not just be an Ubuntu problem then. Thank god for the extended warranty if it does go. :eek:

jkmoogle · 1 Nov 2008 at 16:45

I found a rather annoying problem when upgrading to 8.10, the wireless light came on, on my laptops case, i thought, "OK, let's test it", went off a charm, but then wouldn't come back on again! Had to reboot to the older kernel to enable it again, couldn't find a way to re-enable a hardware kill switch. Other than that, system runs quite a bit smoother, can't say i enjoy the new network management program though, but I suppose i'll get used to it!
JK

MikeTimbers · 1 Nov 2008 at 18:44

Ran the upgrade on one of my VMs and it seems to lock at the graphical login screen. I've tried the recovery mode boot option and it can't find anything wrong. Anyone with any suggestions?

fishfishfish · 1 Nov 2008 at 19:37

Also, if anyone has any info about this 'seamless RDP', I'd be interested.

Seamless virtualisation allows you to run Windows applications on your Linux desktop without the whole Windows VM desktop showing. You can set it up using the guide on the Ubuntu wiki, or you can use a simpler version that's built into the Sun xVM version of VirtualBox.

There are a couple of versions of VirtualBox - the open source one and the proprietary Sun xVM version, which includes seamless virtualisation built in. To use it, all you need to do is start up the Windows VM and select Machine > Seamless mode. You'll then see the desktop disappear and the Windows taskbar appear at the bottom of your Ubuntu desktop. You can use the Start menu to fire up apps and they'll be visible on the Ubuntu desktop.

You can set the taskbar to autohide if you don't want to see it. Or you can use the more advanced RDP system, but this is a little more tricky to set up and to use.

NightSt@lk3r · 1 Nov 2008 at 21:19

kkelly said:
My gnome doesnt load anymore !

Stops at 'Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local)'

Any ideas?, was a base install of 8.04 with default updates only

I can get to a prompt by pressing cnt+alt+f1, but im stuck from there

Type startx in the terminal and see what happens.

mattgaunt · 2 Nov 2008 at 18:56

I was sort of hoping for open office 3 with this release

and does anyone know if flash 10 will be on the latest ubuntu at any point? On the plus side some of the GUI seems really nicely polished off

Berserker · 2 Nov 2008 at 19:41

fishfishfish said:
Seamless virtualisation allows you to run Windows applications on your Linux desktop

Gotcha - same deal as with Parallels on the Mac.

Or you can use the more advanced RDP system, but this is a little more tricky to set up and to use.

This is the bit I'm more interested in. Can it be used with remote Windows hosts or is it restricted only to local VMs? The machine I want to run this on isn't beefy enough to handle VirtualBox, but I use Remote Desktop - a lot, and would love a good Linux option.

Thanks.

NightSt@lk3r · 3 Nov 2008 at 00:53

Berserker said:
This is the bit I'm more interested in. Can it be used with remote Windows hosts or is it restricted only to local VMs? The machine I want to run this on isn't beefy enough to handle VirtualBox, but I use Remote Desktop - a lot, and would love a good Linux option.

Thanks.

I used the Terminal Server Client that comes with 8.10 to login to my Windows XP PC and it works just as good as the built in Windows Client if that is what you want to know?

JRS · 8 Nov 2008 at 14:25

Updated to 8.10 this morning. Half an hour after the update completed, I got my Wacom working again. That irritation aside (since Lord knows I had enough problems getting the little sod to work on XP x64 as well back when I moved over to that), the update went very smoothly. I'm waiting for something else to pop up out of the woodwork and advertise itself as broken, but it hasn't happened yet.

I don't like it when updates mostly go well, it makes me uneasy