My experiences with Ubuntu 8.10, part 2: Hangs, OpenOffice, Fonts, and more…
In the last article, I wrote about some of my experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I've continued to use it over the last couple of days and so I thought I'd post a follow-up article with some more notes that I've compiled about this latest Ubuntu release.
By the way...
I want to make clear that not everything has been roses so far. There seems to be a crash/hang that I've triggered twice now (once while trying to plug in an external USB hard drive, and once while trying to set up a network printer) where the entire GUI hangs. I can move the mouse around but I can't click on anything, and the standard X.org tricks of pressing ctrl-alt-F1 to drop to a terminal or ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X don't work. However, both times that this hang has occurred I was able to ssh into the machine from another computer and tell the computer to reboot from the command line ("sudo reboot now"). I haven't been able to reproduce these hangs thus far.
OpenOffice.org 2.4 vs. 3.0
OpenOffice.org 3.0
Ubuntu 8.10 ships by default with OpenOffice.org 2.4. Recently, version 3.0 was released. I wish they had shipped with this version, but it's not hard to upgrade. I followed the process outlined at Softpedia and upgraded to 3.0 without a hitch.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 seems to be a great release; I've thrown all sorts of Microsoft Office documents at it and it's been able to open and edit them without any issues. Creating documents from scratch in the OOo native file formats is easy as well. Anyone familiar with Microsoft Office should feel right at home here.
Gnome Do
In addition to Linux, I use Mac OS X and Windows for work and play from time to time. One of my favorite apps on the Mac is Quicksilver. It's essentially a program launcher that's operated entirely with your keyboard and makes it incredibly easy to launch any app installed on your system. After I got used to Quicksilver on the Mac, it was a pain when using Windows to have to go to Start -> Programs -> CompanyName -> AppName to launch a program. Luckily there's Launchy, which is a clone of Quicksilver for Windows.
The default Ubuntu software repositories have a similar app, Gnome Do, which seems to perform all of the functions that I use from Quicksilver and Launchy flawlessly. You simply press a hotkey to bring it up, start typing the name of the program you want to open, and press enter when it's displayed. You really have to try it to get the hang of how it works -- it's changed the way I use computers.
Gnome Do also comes with a bunch of plugins which add additional functionality. For example, there's a "Tweet" action which will post whatever you type to Twitter, and there's a Delicious plugin that'll index all of your Delicious bookmarks and let you search them.
Smooth Fonts
Font Appearance Prefs
I absolutely love the way fonts look using subpixel smoothing in Ubuntu 8.10. To enable subpixel rendering, go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance and click the Fonts tab. The difference between the default "Best Shapes" rendering and subpixel smoothing is like night and day to my eyes. Some people don't like lots of font antialiasing and therefore would probably prefer the default setting, but I highly recommend at least trying subpixel smoothing to see if it looks better to you.
Incidentally, as you can see in the screenshot to the left, I use a font called Inconsolata as my fixed width font. It's a great font for programming and console use and is available for free at Raph Levien's website.
More to come...
As of right now I'm running Intrepid full time on my main desktop computer, so I'm sure I'll have more notes to post in the near future. Thanks for reading and check back soon for more!
My experiences with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, part 1
A few nights ago I installed a release candidate of Ubuntu's latest release, Intrepid Ibex. I've been upgrading nightly so I have what is now presumably the final release installed on my system. Overall, it's been easy to use and trouble-free. In this post (and a series of follow-up posts) I'd like to detail some of my findings.
nVidia video with dual monitors
Hardware Drivers tool
My computer setup consists of an Intel Core 2 Duo system with 2GB of RAM, and an nVidia GeForce 7600GT-based video card. I have two 19" LCDs connected to the video card. In the past this has been somewhat of a hassle to get working in the Linux distributions I've tried. However, with Ubuntu 8.10, I simply ran the Hardware Drivers tool to install the proprietary nVidia drivers. This installed the "NVIDIA X Server Settings" app which easily allowed me to configure my dual monitor setup and get up and running.
NVIDIA Settings app
I chose the TwinView configuration which is essentially the configuration that Mac or Windows dual monitor users would be used to: your taskbar appears on one screen and the other screen is initially blank, but ready for you to drag your windows onto. I've noticed a few minor inconsistencies with this setup; some apps appear to see one giant monitor instead of two separate ones (for instance, making YouTube movies full screen fills up both screens with the movie centered across the seam between the two monitors). There haven't been any problems that I'd consider dealbreaking, however.
Printing to a Windows shared printer
My fiancée has our printer hooked up to her computer, and it's shared via Windows printer sharing. In Ubuntu, I simply went to System->Administration->Printing and added the printer, following the prompts. It detected the printer and then allowed me to select the correct driver for it. From start to finish it took me about 30 seconds to set the printer up, and it's printed flawlessly ever since. This is something that my Mac laptop couldn't do out of the box!
DVD ripping woes
I came across a couple of GUI-based apps to rip DVDs, a task which I perform occasionally and had mostly only done on Windows until now. The first, K9Copy, was a KDE app that was in the Ubuntu repository. It immediately crashed upon attempting to open the first DVD disc I inserted.
The second app was called DVD::Rip, which is apparently a Perl-based front end to a bunch of command line ripping tools. It seemed to work alright, but I didn't like the interface and it seemed to lack a few features (for instance, ripping a DVD to an ISO image).
DVDFab under Wine!
DVDFab shortcut
Dejected, I began to think that maybe I'd have to keep Windows and/or my Mac around for a few tasks. Then, I remembered Wine. I thought it was a long shot, but what if I could use the DVD ripping program that I used on Windows (the excellent DVDFab Decrypter)? Then I wouldn't have to keep Windows around at all! I installed the latest Wine following the directions on the Wine site, and ran the DVDFab installer. It worked! It even automagically placed a shortcut in my Applications menu for me. Within 20 minutes or so DVDFab had completed ripping its first DVD without any issues.
And more...
I'll be writing additional posts in the near future with more of my experiences with Ubuntu 8.10. Until then, stay tuned!