8 replies to this topic

[truefusion]

So the first beta is supposed to be out today. I normally switch to the new ones around this time—which i have already done so. As some of you may know, one of the goals of this version is to decrease the amount of time it takes for the system to boot up yet again, the goal being no more than 10 seconds on a "medium system." According to their website removing HAL is one of the things that will accomplish this goal. That caught me a bit by surprise since HAL concerns hardware, like CD-ROM drives, USB, et cetera. But the system is still capable of accessing these things.

So, has Canonical accomplished their goal of booting up the system of about twice as fast as the previous version? Yes, they have! And it boots up incredibly fast on my system! Within a few seconds i am met with the display manager (KDM in my case)! Sometimes i don't even see the Ubuntu logo due to how fast the boot time is, which is a bit of a shame, too, since that new logo is looking pretty nice. I'm not sure what these people did, but so far they are accomplishing everything they set out to do. The question is, do they know beforehand that they can accomplish it and then tell the world, or do they set a goal and hope to accomplish it?

Whatever the case, for anyone looking to upgrade at this point, i don't recommend it. I installed the system through a netboot installation: this downloads everything from Ubuntu's repository allowing to install the system without needing a CD, DVD or USB drive, just an internet connection. It could be just the netboot installer being slightly faulty at this point, but when the installer tried to update the hardware clock, it seems to have corrupted some data in it which prevented me from using my ethernet port. This was easily fixed, though, by clearing the CMOS data (messing around with the jumpers). But for that reason i don't recommend people to upgrade at this time.

[Baniboy]

Nice.
Although I don't really get why it has to boot so fast. Probably because I'm rarely in a situation that I have to get online under one minute. What I would really like would be that they optimized the after-boot performance. I care about that one so much more. And new features would be nice too. For the less nerdy people I mean. Something completely new and useful that's not available on Mac OS X or Windows would be really nice. That might be hard to accomplish, but hey, you can dream...

So, since you're daring, I have a few questions:
1. Which Firefox version is available in the repos? I'm kind of sick of the way Ubuntu doesn't update to the latest firefox version in the repos... I could compile, but still, it's annoying and I would expect that a decent distro can keep up to date with the most used web browser on their platform.
2. Is the general performance better than the one on 9.10? I know it's a beta, but oh well..

Quote

That caught me a bit by surprise since HAL concerns hardware, like CD-ROM drives, USB, et cetera. But the system is still capable of accessing these things.

3. So what does this exactly mean? Does it boot without launching the necessary USB interfaces and such and you have to access them manually?
4. Has anything changed radically from 9.10, like astonishing features or something?

Edited by Baniboy, 18 March 2010 - 08:06 PM.

[truefusion]

Baniboy, on Mar 18 2010, 04:04 PM, said:

Nice.
Although I don't really get why it has to boot so fast. Probably because I'm rarely in a situation that I have to get online under one minute. What I would really like would be that they optimized the after-boot performance. I care about that one so much more. And new features would be nice too. For the less nerdy people I mean. Something completely new and useful that's not available on Mac OS X or Windows would be really nice. That might be hard to accomplish, but hey, you can dream...

The "after-boot performance" is normally the user's fault, due to the programs they have auto-start upon logging in. But i normally uninstall the ones i don't need that come pre-installed on the system (e.g. bluetooth support). Personally, i would like to be able to reach the desktop as fast as possible just for the sake of reaching it fast. Not really interested in wasting time waiting for things to load.

Baniboy, on Mar 18 2010, 04:04 PM, said:

1. Which Firefox version is available in the repos? I'm kind of sick of the way Ubuntu doesn't update to the latest firefox version in the repos... I could compile, but still, it's annoying and I would expect that a decent distro can keep up to date with the most used web browser on their platform.

3.6; and, yes, compiling Firefox is really annoying (though i would just download the pre-compiled version).

Baniboy, on Mar 18 2010, 04:04 PM, said:

2. Is the general performance better than the one on 9.10? I know it's a beta, but oh well..

Seems about the same.

Baniboy, on Mar 18 2010, 04:04 PM, said:

3. So what does this exactly mean? Does it boot without launching the necessary USB interfaces and such and you have to access them manually?

File managers and the like are still able to access these drives, just, apparently, not through HAL anymore. I've only ever heard of HAL, so i'm not sure what they're using now.

Baniboy, on Mar 18 2010, 04:04 PM, said:

4. Has anything changed radically from 9.10, like astonishing features or something?

I wouldn't call it radical, nor a "feature," but some GUI changes have been made, some of which have been voted against (like the window buttons being the left like in Mac OS). But i should mention i didn't install GNOME (though the window buttons change is for Ubuntu and not Kubuntu).

[martvefun]

looks nice, I may give a try to it.

truefusion, on Mar 18 2010, 08:49 PM, said:

So, has Canonical accomplished their goal of booting up the system of about twice as fast as the previous version?

If you are talking about 10 sec it's 4 time faster for me (and I don't have a bad computer)

The problem with firefox (and other software) is due to the fix release policy of ubuntu. Since I've tried operating system with rolling release (debian sid, archlinux) I consider ubuntu as my second OS in case of the primary is broken
Too much to do if you want to have the very last version of software...

[rvalkass]

truefusion, on Mar 18 2010, 09:20 PM, said:

File managers and the like are still able to access these drives, just, apparently, not through HAL anymore. I've only ever heard of HAL, so i'm not sure what they're using now.

HAL was built on top of udev, the part of the kernel that deals with loading devices and the relevant access to them. I think most of the functionality and features HAL provided have been incorporated into udev in the latest kernel, so HAL simply isn't necessary - it would just be replecating features that are now part of the standard kernel. Presumably that provides a speed boost compared to having the features of HAL as a separate load of code to load up each time.

[shadowx]

Interesting, what's the release date for the full system? I have two machines at home, one is a gaming PC with win7 and the other is my trusty laptop with XP and Ubunutu Karmic so i am hesitant to go into a beta at the moment but ill definitely update when the full release is out.

[truefusion]

So after trying to replace the ATI drivers that are now enabled by default for those with ATI cards (which have horrible HD video performance and probably other issues) with the proprietary ATI drivers (which don't have any apparent issues), it has prevented the X server from loading, so i reinstalled the system (Kubuntu 10.04 Beta 1) this time using unetbootin. I've finally figured out how get the installer to install the kernel (without having to unmount /cdrom—this is what prevented it from installing the kernel) so that GRUB picks it up. And i have not experienced any RTC data corruption (though all of this has caused Windows to display the wrong time). However, the new installer for Kubuntu lags a lot.

shadowx, on Mar 19 2010, 12:59 PM, said:

what's the release date for the full system?

https://wiki.ubuntu....ReleaseSchedule

[martvefun]

April 29th If they are keeping going like this, next release won't be 10.10 but 10.11

[Baniboy]

Thanks for the info.
What a shame they've changed the placement of the window buttons. I kinda like that I have the window name and window buttons separate. That is, if they haven't aligned the name to the right. That would really get me into trying out Kubuntu... Hope somebody hacks this thing and returns the positioning back to normal! Or the developers change it back themselves after they receive the hate-mail I'm s... *cough*

Anyway, by after-boot performance I actually meant stuff performing faster, like window management, GUI and other stuff in general. Not the one dependent on my 100+ open firefox tabs