Ok, I've just tried my 12.04 / Unity laptop with my 22" monitor.
The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity launcher to the right hand side of my main screen, the 22" display, so that it doesn't get in the way of scrolling to the laptop's screen.
Yes. I am generally supportive of Unity but this is one thing I just can't understand. I get the rationale for avoiding a bottom dock on a widescreen monitor, but the left-hand side doesn't even make sense (browser back button is on the left, window close button is on the left - any time I try to use either of them I accidentally trigger the launcher). The best solution I found was to use ccsm and change the hotkey to anything other than "left screen edge" or something similar.
The launcher then auto-hides permanently, but you can still cause it to appear with the windows key. Disappointing, really - there's no clever artistic or design reason to disallow a right-hand dock. It just seems like a case of hubris and ignorance.
Ok, here's a simple workaround for now. It doesn't let you put the launcher on the right, but it lets you keep the launcher only on one window (the laptop in your case).
Go to System Settings > Displays. The "Launcher placement" is set to "All displays" by default. Change it to "Laptop" (or whatever screen's on the left).
Be happy that you can get that far. My Dell Vostro V13 crashes as soon as I uncheck the "mirror displays" checkbox. Some light research pointed me to a known bug for this which didn't make it into this release.
I ran into this when Unity first debuted. That's when I knew it wasn't ready for prime time.
It's sad that this is still a limitation, but not entirely surprising. Canonical seemed to be intent on pushing this to everyone regardless. And now they don't even seem to be supporting the traditional Gnome desktop (whether 2.X or 3.X).
This isn't necessarily directed at you (I make the same complaint to System76), but I really wish I could go on Amazon and buy a Linux laptop. I like the security of Amazon payments, the customer service, and I am a Prime subscriber so I like the free two-day shipping.
Seems counterproductive (or at least bad marketing) to me to force the user to register before he can see your products. I suppose most people will simply leave your page without registering because they can't see what you offer.
I'm curious, what does selling Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed involved? Does Lenovo sell in bulk as an OEM, OS-less? Other companies have sold Thinkpads running Linux for years (Emperor Linux, IIRC) but at a large markup, such that I assume they're buying in tiny quantities, maybe even retail one at a time, unboxing/installing Linux/boxing/reshipping (pure conjecture, I've never looked into it). Also, any nonfree drivers required?
Just signed up. Would love to hear more about your business. It's really a pain to find a laptop that would not suck under Linux for any of the important dimensions (wifi, battery life, external monitor support, working fn keys and etc).
I know of System76 and etc, but their hardware doesn't inspire me much (spoiled by Apple).
Please please please have an ultrabook style book on launch. I'm in the market for one and it seems most have trouble running ubuntu :-/. I need a reliable linux laptop seller, so good luck!
I'm one of those weird folk who run three monitors, and even though 12.04 promised better 2+ monitor support through Unity 2D, I still find it lacking. Perhaps it's the way I have it configured, but I use two nvidia cards with xinerama, which means I'm forced to use Unity 2D (no compositing support). Unity 2D just isn't as stable or usable. I really, really hope they put more effort to fixing this in 12.10.
As someone who went to Fedora 16 after the initial Unity debacle, I've been using 12.04 on my laptops, and I must say, it's generally been a pleasant experience.
I still haven't tried with multi-screens, so I'm not sure how well it works there.
After a few tweaks, I'm rather chuffed with 12.04:
- Change icons down to 32x32
- Auto-hide drawer
- Change theme to Radiance
- Set terminal font to 10 and colors to white on black / Linux colors.
I recommend people give it a second chance, particularly on laptops.
OT: There was an "Ellen" clip or something that was posted somewhere about UK-vs-US slangs words and iirc 'chuff' was there (the USAian didn't know what it was). I had to look up the definition to understand 100% whether you were pleased or displeased. :)
I've been teaching the beta for a while now, I like it. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS comes with new vagrant, puppet and arduino 1.0. And with Xubuntu, you can use a traditional desktop. Some of my experiences teaching with the beta
http://terokarvinen.com/2012/xubuntu-12-04-lts-on-vappu
If Canonical is reading this, please put up a torrent link on the main page with both versions. Obviously your servers can't handle the load right now.
Been using the Beta releases for a while now and I'm hooked, Unity has matured in to a really well thought out and compelling desktop environment.
My absolute favorite feature is hitting the alt key (from any app) and being about to navigate the menus and options e.g. in FireFox Alt > Type "Edit" and i see all the options available - Very Slick and means i can use the keyboard to effectively navigate all apps now, Previous versions of unity didn't really lend themselves to this.
I'd like to know how the 10.04 -> 12.04 upgrade goes in places that use the Long Term Support (LTS) Ubuntu releases as end user machines. The change in UI is quite radical if you have not worked thru' 11.04 and 11.10 6 monthly releases. It struck me that there may be people here who have access/work in organisations with large deployments.
I'd be interested in knowing about the training issues that arose and what action was taken, and how people like the new interface. Sort of a high volume test of Canonical's user testing driven design.
I imagine most of the large volume upgrades will be taking place after 12.04.1 is released sometime June.
I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for the past month and must say it is pretty stable for a beta version and I'm so glad that final version is out. Hoping to stick with it until Ubuntu 14.04
Has anyone tried using this on a netbook? My wife is interested in trying Linux, and I was thinking Ubuntu (or Lubuntu) might be a good choice for her. Speed is an issue for her and one of the reasons she's not satisfied with Windows. I'd introduce her to Gentoo, but I don't think she'd appreciate the joy of GNU make.
My netbook is running Lubuntu 11.10. It was previously running Ubuntu 10.x Netbook Edition and Ubuntu 10.04. They work. (I like Gentoo too, but I don't want to do much compiling on a netbook.)
Most GUI programs aren't designed to use in 1024x600. For example, it's hard to actually read email in Thunderbird because there isn't much room for text after subtracting pixels for window decorations, menu bar, toolbar, header bar, and status bar. I think a netbook would benefit from a tiling window manager, but I haven't got around to installing one yet.
I am currently running it on my Toshiba NB 305 net book. I've been pleased with the performance overall, but on the few occasions where I needed more power, I switched desktop environments to lxde and performance was boosted.
I installed beta 2 and run into issues with disk power management. By default it had a very small timeout to spin down. Fixed manually with hdparm -S, but I didn't see any updates that correct it. If you notice your drive clicking all the time, there's your fix...
We built and added Ubuntu 12.04 to our provisioning system for cloud servers at SSD Nodes (http://www.ssdnodes.com). It boots very quickly on our hypervisors at just 5-10 seconds.
I'm pretty sure your claim about the 45,000 IOPs being the most of any SATA SSDs is no longer true.
The (consumer grade) Intel 520 SSDs claim 80,000 random write IOPs, and I think I remember seeing the cheaper SATA SSDs on the Dell R720s doing 100K+ (obviously the SAS SSDs do more as do FusionIOs and PCI based express flash)
But to bring it back to Ubuntu - do you use the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution or what?
Has anyone tried to dist-upgrade? Does it work well?
Around the time I was a Ubuntu user (around Hardy 8.04), dist-upgrade would usually break your box and was discouraged by Canonical themselves. If I recall correctly.
Is there a reason that Canonical doesn't make upgrading via torrent more front-and-center? It seems like on huge release days like today they'd want the swarm to lend itself a hand.
i'm thinking of triple-booting my 2009 MBP with Ubuntu (already Bootcamped with Win7). anyone has experience with Ubuntu on MBPs? any problem with hardware? i need a lightweight-but-nice-looking OS for day-to-day Java development (i use IntelliJ), Lion is taxing too much.
Running ubuntu as my main OS on my 2011 MBP for a while. Everything works and is stable except for the wireless driver, which you have to compile yourself and only supports wireless G. Things may have changed in the last months though. I don't know about the 2009 MBP hardware.
I've been running 11.04 on my 2010 MBP for a while. It drains the battery pretty quickly. I had to mess around with the trackpad settings a bit to get that into a usable state, and I had to disable tap-to-click completely because it completely sucks at palm rejection. The startup screen is completely screwy and it often fails to turn the machine off when shutting down.
Triple booting on Santa Rosa 2007 MBP. Upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard and had many problems, lack of recovery partition, Spotlight failure etc. Need to reformat and reinstall all to get spotlight working again.
I had severe difficulty getting Ubuntu to appear as a bootable partition when installed from a USB stick. Don't install from stick, install from a disc. Whatever it did with EFI didn't work right, there were partitions on my hard drive that Mac OS X wouldn't touch, it was a mess.
I had to repartition and reformat my HD and restore from Time Machine.
[+] [-] cryptolect|14 years ago|reply
The thing is, I have my laptop on the left, and 22" on the right. So I want to set the Unity launcher to the right hand side of my main screen, the 22" display, so that it doesn't get in the way of scrolling to the laptop's screen.
Sounds simple right? Switching the launcher from left to right? Wrong. http://askubuntu.com/questions/123552/unity-launcher-on-righ...
In short, I'm advised to switch to a whole different desktop manager for that simple functionality. What a crock of shit.
I still like it for laptops, but this inflexibility ruins it for multi-displays. BRB, installing another desktop manager...
A few more links on the subject:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/740391
http://askubuntu.com/questions/33605/can-i-move-the-unity-la...
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/2
[+] [-] sgentle|14 years ago|reply
The launcher then auto-hides permanently, but you can still cause it to appear with the windows key. Disappointing, really - there's no clever artistic or design reason to disallow a right-hand dock. It just seems like a case of hubris and ignorance.
[+] [-] muyuu|14 years ago|reply
If you can avoid ATI you shall be fine in Debian land.
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
Go to System Settings > Displays. The "Launcher placement" is set to "All displays" by default. Change it to "Laptop" (or whatever screen's on the left).
Hope that helps.
[+] [-] rplnt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heywire|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akavlie|14 years ago|reply
It's sad that this is still a limitation, but not entirely surprising. Canonical seemed to be intent on pushing this to everyone regardless. And now they don't even seem to be supporting the traditional Gnome desktop (whether 2.X or 3.X).
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heretohelp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philjackson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kijin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MBlume|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noahc|14 years ago|reply
You should add more info like "Hey, a little OT, but here's how the process works. Etc" to avoid down votes for lack of contribution.
[+] [-] revorad|14 years ago|reply
If you're interested in buying Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed and fully tested, please sign up here - http://giniji.com/ubuntu_laptops.html
</plug>
[+] [-] freehunter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octopus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlinksva|14 years ago|reply
I'm curious, what does selling Thinkpads with Linux pre-installed involved? Does Lenovo sell in bulk as an OEM, OS-less? Other companies have sold Thinkpads running Linux for years (Emperor Linux, IIRC) but at a large markup, such that I assume they're buying in tiny quantities, maybe even retail one at a time, unboxing/installing Linux/boxing/reshipping (pure conjecture, I've never looked into it). Also, any nonfree drivers required?
edit: I should've looked before speculating about Emperor. I gather that they order a machine from the manufacturer when a customer orders http://www.emperorlinux.com/quality/?page=configure but they have some kind of relationship with the manufacturer, not just retail http://www.emperorlinux.com/why/ (see warranty at bottom).
[+] [-] TY|14 years ago|reply
I know of System76 and etc, but their hardware doesn't inspire me much (spoiled by Apple).
[+] [-] hlfshell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rufugee|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptolect|14 years ago|reply
I still haven't tried with multi-screens, so I'm not sure how well it works there.
After a few tweaks, I'm rather chuffed with 12.04: - Change icons down to 32x32 - Auto-hide drawer - Change theme to Radiance - Set terminal font to 10 and colors to white on black / Linux colors.
I recommend people give it a second chance, particularly on laptops.
[+] [-] luser001|14 years ago|reply
PSA: chuff == Brit slang for to please or delight (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chuff)
[+] [-] krupan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tero|14 years ago|reply
I've been teaching the beta for a while now, I like it. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS comes with new vagrant, puppet and arduino 1.0. And with Xubuntu, you can use a traditional desktop. Some of my experiences teaching with the beta http://terokarvinen.com/2012/xubuntu-12-04-lts-on-vappu
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oconnore|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derrida|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floydprice|14 years ago|reply
My absolute favorite feature is hitting the alt key (from any app) and being about to navigate the menus and options e.g. in FireFox Alt > Type "Edit" and i see all the options available - Very Slick and means i can use the keyboard to effectively navigate all apps now, Previous versions of unity didn't really lend themselves to this.
[+] [-] alexmuller|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithpeter|14 years ago|reply
I'd be interested in knowing about the training issues that arose and what action was taken, and how people like the new interface. Sort of a high volume test of Canonical's user testing driven design.
I imagine most of the large volume upgrades will be taking place after 12.04.1 is released sometime June.
I've contributed a poster for the coffee area...
http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/brochure/1204-poster
[+] [-] octopus|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mise|14 years ago|reply
They lost me to Mint in their last couple of releases.
[+] [-] sajithdilshan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scribblemacher|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dripton|14 years ago|reply
Most GUI programs aren't designed to use in 1024x600. For example, it's hard to actually read email in Thunderbird because there isn't much room for text after subtracting pixels for window decorations, menu bar, toolbar, header bar, and status bar. I think a netbook would benefit from a tiling window manager, but I haven't got around to installing one yet.
[+] [-] billsix|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Random_Person|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Garbage|14 years ago|reply
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel
[+] [-] viraptor|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XERQ|14 years ago|reply
/plug
[+] [-] nl|14 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure your claim about the 45,000 IOPs being the most of any SATA SSDs is no longer true.
The (consumer grade) Intel 520 SSDs claim 80,000 random write IOPs, and I think I remember seeing the cheaper SATA SSDs on the Dell R720s doing 100K+ (obviously the SAS SSDs do more as do FusionIOs and PCI based express flash)
But to bring it back to Ubuntu - do you use the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution or what?
[+] [-] babarock|14 years ago|reply
Around the time I was a Ubuntu user (around Hardy 8.04), dist-upgrade would usually break your box and was discouraged by Canonical themselves. If I recall correctly.
[+] [-] portmanteaufu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiradikusuma|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argarg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2s|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolleykibber|14 years ago|reply
Ubuntu is now my main OS.
[+] [-] Lewisham|14 years ago|reply
I had to repartition and reformat my HD and restore from Time Machine.
[+] [-] brendoncrawford|14 years ago|reply
It can help with some of the multi-boot problems people tend to have with Ubuntu on MBP.