Ubuntu ZA

Giving Unity Another Go

Yesterday I installed Unity5.0 and I was pleasantly surprised by some of its new features:

• I can set the panel background colour. By default, the Unity panel adapts itself to match the wallpaper colour. This doesn’t always work out, and with certain background colours it looks really horrible with the icons on it. I set mine to a none-harsh, dark grey and can now see my icons without any desire to fork out my eyes.
• I can set the launcher panel to be ever present. I have plenty of horizontal screen space and I find it annoying not having a window list present on my display. When I have to hover my mouse to the left edge and wait a few hundred milliseconds before I even see the list of open apps and where they are positioned, it just annoys me. Having them always on-screen is just so much easier.
• It’s fast and more stable. Unity 5.0 is noticeably more snappy than it’s predecessors. It also feels less buggy. What drove me away from Unity on Oneiric was that the window placement snapping got horribly confused now and again and the only way out of it was to kill Compiz or otherwise restart Unity. My session is 24 hours old already and still going strong

Some Areas that could do with Improvement

Update: I thought it’s worth mentioning that removing the Gwibber lens removed close to *500MB* of that extra 1GB RAM that was used. There also seems to be an issue where gdbus and dconf worker are way more busy than they should be (at least on my machine). I’m figuring it out and will file bugs if I can confirm them. When they behave better then memory usage in Unity and Gnome Fallback shouldn’t be that far apart.

• Global menus still get confused about running apps. Sometimes I’d get a Thunderbird title in the menu space and Thunderbird has already been closed. This is kind of weird when you’re not aware of the bug.
• Memory usage is high. I’m currently using around 1GB more memory than I typically would when using the Gnome 3 Fallback session with the same software running. I’m hoping that it stays there and that it won’t continue to rise due to memory leaks and other memory issues. This is a deal breaker on application servers.
• The Dash isn’t very pretty or user friendly. I guess the dash didn’t get much work or research done due to the focus on getting bugs fixed, so it’s probably not all that bad. At least you can right-click on the Ubuntu icon now and get a list of installed Unity lenses. The Dash home should really be customisable, and I’m not sure how users are supposed to do some rudimentary tasks like connect to a network share.

Overall Thoughts

Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

This year I just want to get more stuff done.

Motto for 2012:

 

JFDI

The Principles Meme

This morning I read the following in a blog entry: “I applaud him for sticking to his principles, and not compromising“. The person who wrote it didn’t even agree with the person he was referring too, and yet he was congratulating him for sticking to his principles. I’ve seen a bunch of similar statements recently. There’s also a similar, more self-congratulating meme where people are very proud that they are unwaveringly sticking to their principles no matter what.

I’m not sure where this comes from, perhaps it stems from religious roots? Perhaps from people who are afraid to admit that they are flawed in any way? Perhaps they have some agenda that they want to push?

What if no one ever compromised on their principles? What if, in South Africa during the Apartheid years no white person were willing to consider that anyone with a different skin colour could be considered an equal? What if people could never see women as equals and they could never get voting rights or other equal rights? There are many, many more concepts in the past that were rooted as moral principles and with the hindsight we have now, we can see that they were clearly wrong. Sticking to those principles would have been harmful. The sad thing is that today still, many concepts in society is flawed. So why do we choose to applaud people who are inflexible, unscientific and in my opinion, irrational?

The Scientists

I applaud the scientist types, the ones who are able to look at new information or evidence and are able to take a step back and say “Hey, maybe I should re-think this!”. I respect those who are willing to say “Perhaps I was wrong” and share they’re experiences with others to get wider feedback rather than the person who will relentlessly defend their position, typically using some absolutes to try to prove their point.

If you’re not ever willing to compromise or re-evaluate based on facts or new information, then I don’t care much for anything you have to say.

Last weekend I spent some time with the LTSP folks at the annual LTSP hackfest called “By The Sea” (or BTS for short). This was my second BTS. It was well attended and these were some of the items that were covered:

• Migration to new NBD
• Bootable chroots
• libpam-ssh
• Epoptis
• Local window manager
• Improvements to ltsp-build-client
• Migrate LDM to GTK+3
• LDM login speedup
• Try to do something about the default LDM theme

   

Other than that it was a great time for LTSP enthusiasts to get together and socialize a bit. For the next few months, the focus is on fixing bugs and getting LTSP in a good shape for when Ubuntu 12.04 LTS arrives, since everything that is done now should be supportable for 5 years. After that there will most likely be some push to move from LDM to LightDM, which will allow us to have much nicer (and more useful) login screens for all kinds of remote sessions. It was great seeing everyone there and I hope to be there again next year!

Great UDS

 

This week I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 in Orlando, Florida in the USA. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begi n.

This was only the 5th UDS I’ve attended so far, it’s also hands down the best. UDS has become a well-oiled machine. Things just worked and everything was in place to ensure highly productive sessions. Kudos to the organisers, you rock!

Thanks to the sponsors: Cloud Foundry,  Rackspace and Google. VMware sponsored the food for this UDS, it was awesome, I hope I haven’t gained too much weight. Also thanks to Canonical for providing me and a whole bunch of other community members full sponsorship.

Ubuntu 12.04 – A high precision release

 

This UDS I spent most of my time on technical sessions rather than on the community side. I find the community sessions emotionally draining, probably because I’m such a strong introvert. The technical sessions on the other hand I find engaging, exciting and inspiring. Most sessions I attended were calm, highly focussed and very productive.

Ubuntu 12.04 is going to be a very special release. So much effort has been put in from the very start to ensure an exceptional high quality release. Some have said that ‘precise’ sounds like a bit of a silly name to type in your sources.list file, but there’s never been an Ubuntu release where precision has been more relevant. There were plenty of sessions covering really important issues like LTS upgrades, the state of MOTU, keeping daily builds usable, the role of the ARB, the relationship with Debian and many more discussions that will lead to having higher quality packages in Ubuntu. I can’t even start to cover it in this blog entry but over the next release I’m going to write a *lot* about it. There’s such amazing focus going into quality and people should know about it!

Venue

 

The Caribe Royale is a great venue for UDS. I think if Nintendo would have ever released a game called “UDS Resort” it would look pretty much like this place. I hope it’s host to a UDS again in the future! It was great seeing so many Ubuntu contributors, especially all the people who attended UDS for the first time. I hope to do so again in 6 months!

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

• LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
• UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
• Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
• Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!