Ubuntu 7.04 - The pace quickens towards final release

-
The number and frequency of updates for Ubuntu 7.04 has picked up a bit over the last five days. Two updates I've noticed is the final OpenOffice 2.2 release (which coincided with OpenOffice stand-alone release), and updates to Compiz that finally enable the cube (see below).

To make the screen shot I ran the 'Take Screenshot' applet with a five second delay, then grabbed the corner facing you with the mouse while holding before the delay timed out and the screen shot was taken. I've got Google Earth on the left and Firefox (with Help and Support on top) on the right.

Up to this point the cube was disabled, and hitting the arrow keys simply moved from desktop to desktop by fading from one to the next. But I like the way this version under Ubuntu has been tuned. The sides of the cube simply flip without the annoying bounce prevalent in the versions running on SLED 10 and Suse 10.1.

The only problem is that Google Earth runs less smoothly with Compiz enabled than with Compiz disabled. It's still far faster than when I had the ATI 9600 card with the Xorg driver. The nVidia video card makes all the difference in the world. But I can tell I'm pushing this older Athlon XP with 512MB of memory with everything turned on and multiple heavy applications running. I knew I'd run into this when I first installed Ubuntu on this machine. This has been a personal experiment to see just how far I could push this kind of hardware with an up-to-date Linux distribution. And I am impressed. If I want smoother operation I can turn off compositing and live with "plain" desktop effects. Maybe I will. And maybe I won't.

It's my choice. All the features I could ever want are right here with one distribution. Not scattered across seven arbitrary versions. Linux gives me full opportunity to pick what I want when I want it. And for that I'm very grateful.

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments are checked. Comment SPAM will be blocked and deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

A Decade Long Religious Con Job

-
Image
I rarely write inflammatory (what some might call trolling) titles to a post, but this building you see before you deserves it. I've been seeing this building next to I-4 just east of Altamonte/436 and Crane's Roost for nearly 12 years, and never knew who owned it. Today on a trip up to Lake Mary with my wife I saw it yet again. That's when I told her I wanted to stop by on the way back and poke around the property, and photograph any parts of it if I could. What I discovered was this still unfinished eighteen story (I counted) white elephant, overgrown with weeds and yet still under slow-motion construction. It looks impressive with its exterior glass curtain walls, but that impression is quickly lost when you see the unfinished lower stories and look inside to the unfinished interior spaces. A quick check via Google leads to an article written in 2010 by the Orlando Sentinel about the Majesty Tower. Based on what I read in the article it's owned by SuperChannel ...
Read more

Ten Reasons to Ignore Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux

-
There is a tradition amongst the hard-core Linux aficionados to extol Linux's various virtues as a list of 10 or more reasons to substitute (as in "dump") an existing Windows installation with Linux. There's no reason to point them all out; a simple Google search (" 10 reasons to use Linux ") will provide you with such lists stretching back through the years, as well as hours of entertainment. One very recent list caught my eye over the weekend, published by PCWorld. Their article, " Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux ", seems to have hit a nerve with me. Normally I just ignore such journalistic pap, since the majority of it comes courtesy of one ill-informed blog or another (such as this one). But in this instance a "real" publication put some time and journalistic "credibility" into this list, which places it in front of a wider audience than the typical blog poist (again, such as this one). So let's consider al...
Read more

Former Eclipse user re-evaluates Eclipse 3.3M5

-
Image
I've been using NetBeans for a while now, starting with version 4.2 in beta. One of NetBeans' key selling points (in my not-so-humble-opinion) is Java GUI building with Matisse . That feature continues to be quite powerful and unrivaled, especially for a free-as-in-beer IDE. I even wrote a lovely paean to the wonders of NetBeans and why I moved away away from Eclipse to NetBeans . Now, it looks like I may have to eat some of those tastefully written words. What you're looking at above is a complete Ruby on Rails project hosted and running within Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5 on Windows XP. Milestone 5 was released this past Friday, February 9th. I installed it Saturday, and then went on a plugin hunt to fill out additional features and capabilities. Why did I decide to re-install Eclipse, especially a milestone? So that I could get a complete integrated development and test capability in one convenient package for Ruby on Rails. Like a lot of other folks I've been playing ...
Read more