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[PandaL]

I guess it's not in big demand anymore, but "pan" is one of my killer apps for usenet binary downloading.

Additionally, I'm a little behind on evince -- it's apparently supposed to be at 3.8, but the version I just installed was only 3.4, so maybe it's substantially different now -- but I use okular and it has a few decidedly important features that I find incredibly helpful (in increasing order of interestingness to me)…
- You can directly type in zoom levels
- Keyboard shortcuts are configurable for nearly every action
- It seems to support more formats
- It supports iPad-style panning with the mouse
- Files can be opened directly over network protocols (like sftp and http)
- You can select a rectangular area then choose to copy into the clipboard either text or image data limited to that area
- It has a table selection tool that you can use to take a table in a document and easily convert it into a spreadsheet object in the clipboard (holy crap, just discovered this one)

Kudos for including pidgin. Back in the '90s, my holy grail of messaging was pretty much what this program eventually offered me (notably plain text logs and tabbed conversations).



If I think of anything else, I'll pass it along.

Thanks for the feedback. Added "Okular" to the list.

 

[ComputerMKII]

I've just realized my AMD proprietary driver for Ubuntu (installed through the Software Sources interface) is old (September 2012), which may be why Team Fortress 2 crashes on launch. I'm gonna try installing the 13.3 beta driver to see if it works.

Edit: Installation was successful, even the desktop seems a lot faster compared to when I used the old proprietary driver.

Edit 2: TF2 works!

Edit 3: But I'm getting lots of graphical glitches

 

[Polari]

The problem with this Wayland thing is Ubuntu don't really care if everyone else uses Wayland. They have enough clout to ensure they get the drivers needed for Mir, and figure everyone else can just sit and spin. Team Wayland really need to ramp up their efforts in displacing Ubuntu as the dominant distribution if they want to ensure widespread support going forward.

Also, fuck Canonical.

 

[ComputerMKII]

I know that Raring Ringtail will come out soon and it will have the Linux 3.8 kernel anyway, but is there an advantage in updating my system from 3.5 to 3.8?

Edit: Am I the only one getting those bugs in TF2 with the latest AMD 13.3 Beta driver?

 

[lmpaler]

After almost a month of stable Linux on my laptop I have converted. I love it. One of the biggest things I love about it is that everything just works. No fuss, if I need help there are fine gents like yourselves or other forums that help.

I look forward to the day I can convert my gaming rig to Linux only.

 

[Hieberrr]

I just did a fresh install of 13.04 Beta 2 and I can't seem to shut down or restart normally. When I go to shut down/restart my PC, the screen turns black like it should and then just hangs there. I'm forced to manually turn it off. Are there any solutions?

 

[zoku88]

I would suggest not installing betas of Ubuntu. Even their releases are kind of unstable sometimes. I wouldn't rely too much on their betas.

 

[b0b]

Interesting. What do we know about Mir?

uhm

it's supposed to be the successor/alternative to the x-server. just like wayland.

it's cannonical reimplementing wayland and putting it under cannonicals license. there is no need for cannonical to not use wayland (their issues with wayland were wrong, so they removed them from their initial "why mir"-article). it's only a licensing issue for them, nothing more.

I don't think cannonical is able to write a better display server than wayland. this will be something like unity, upstart, plymouth etc. - only used in ubuntu



I believe wayland will turn out great through (these guys seems to know exactly that they are doing)

 

[GameplayWhore]

I believe wayland will turn out great through (these guys seems to know exactly that they are doing)

My only worry is that the single biggest "killer app"* that Linux introduced for me (effortless running of individual remote apps) could suffer. A quick web search seems to indicate that this has been upgraded from "it won't do that" to "it's possible but isn't a high priority for implementation", which doesn't raise my spirits. Anybody here chance to hear something better?


* the second biggest one was being able to type "Install this program I want without me having to download some untrusted executable file from a random website" or use an equivalent clickypointy app to do the same, though that sort of thing finally (after a decade) reached the rest of the computing world, so it's less of a big thing now.

 

[Cheeto]

My only worry is that the single biggest "killer app"* that Linux introduced for me (effortless running of individual remote apps) could suffer. A quick web search seems to indicate that this has been upgraded from "it won't do that" to "it's possible but isn't a high priority for implementation", which doesn't raise my spirits. Anybody here chance to hear something better?

Do you mean X11 forwarding? That's not going to be a thing in wayland?

 

[ComputerMKII]

With Luna’s release just around the corner and “feature freeze” far behind us, just what is our UX team doing these days? Well for one thing, we’re making sure Luna looks super sharp.

http://elementaryos.org/journal/new-folder-icons-luna

Could it be true?

 

[Slavik81]

Do you mean X11 forwarding? That's not going to be a thing in wayland?

X11 forwarding works through sending rendering commands over the network, but Wayland specifically avoids specifying how you do your rendering. Most of what Wayland does is passing pixel buffers to the various things that need them.

The justification for not supporting X11-style forwarding is that the X11 forwarding is already dead... at least in how it was originally conceived. Many modern applications already have moved away from X11 rendering, so the X11 forwarding is not the efficient forwarding of render commands, but is now shuffling rendered images across the network. That's only going to become more and more true going forward, as well. Qt 5, for instance, is pushing hard on OpenGL rendering.

Basically, they've pushed solving that problem off to others.

Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.

This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

It is also possible to put a remoting protocol into a wayland compositor, either a standalone remoting compositor or as a part of a full desktop compositor. This will let us forward native Wayland applications. The standalone compositor could let you log into a server and run an application back on your desktop. Building the forwarding into the desktop compositor could let you export or share a window on the fly with a remote wayland compositor, for example, a friend's desktop.

EDIT: Though, it appears Weston, the reference implementation of Wayland, will support FreeRDP for remote applications. That's a very new development.

 

[Polari]

http://elementaryos.org/journal/new-folder-icons-luna

Could it be true?

"Let's celebrate by ripping off OS X even more shamelessly than we already are."

 

[Aleph]

Every time I try to install Debian, I end up uninstalling it because too many things don't work. This time I had to install GRUB manually because the installer failed to do so, and also had to enter text rescue mode because my user wasn't created, and for some reason root didn't have a password. After that, I had to manually upgrade the kernel to get the Intel drivers working, and install Wifi drivers. Touchpad, brightness control and volume control didn't work correctly.

After that I decided to stay with Xubuntu (I had installed it already on another partition), so far everything works fine. I guess I'll try Debian on my desktop, it's probably much easier to install it there.

My objective is to get a Linux distribution running where everything works correctly, and gives me better battery life than Windows.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

"Let's celebrate by ripping off OS X even more shamelessly than we already are."

Too true.

 

[lmpaler]

Every time I try to install Debian, I end up uninstalling it because too many things don't work. This time I had to install GRUB manually because the installer failed to do so, and also had to enter text rescue mode because my user wasn't created, and for some reason root didn't have a password. After that, I had to manually upgrade the kernel to get the Intel drivers working, and install Wifi drivers. Touchpad, brightness control and volume control didn't work correctly.

After that I decided to stay with Xubuntu (I had installed it already on another partition), so far everything works fine. I guess I'll try Debian on my desktop, it's probably much easier to install it there.

My objective is to get a Linux distribution running where everything works correctly, and gives me better battery life than Windows.

I had issues with Fuduntu, but it is said that it is the best for laptops on the net.

 

[FLEABttn]

Trying ubuntu again. Frustrated again. The open source driver doesn't give me hardware acceleration and makes my GPU fan loud (5870). The proprietary driver prevents unity from starting at all. What gives?

 

[Slavik81]

Trying ubuntu again. Frustrated again. The open source driver doesn't give me hardware acceleration and makes my GPU fan loud (5870). The proprietary driver prevents unity from starting at all. What gives?

12.10? It's buggy. I don't know what Cannonical was doing, given that they shipped with an obvious, critical defect.

I suggest trying this guide:
http://techhamlet.com/2012/11/install-nvidia-drivers-in-ubuntu-12-10/

# get rid of your existing drivers
sudo apt-get purge nvidia-current nvidia-current-updates nvidia-experimental-304 nvidia-experimental-310

# install dependencies
sudo apt-get install linux-source
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

# install driver
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-updates

 

[PandaL]

Every time I try to install Debian, I end up uninstalling it because too many things don't work. This time I had to install GRUB manually because the installer failed to do so, and also had to enter text rescue mode because my user wasn't created, and for some reason root didn't have a password. After that, I had to manually upgrade the kernel to get the Intel drivers working, and install Wifi drivers. Touchpad, brightness control and volume control didn't work correctly.

After that I decided to stay with Xubuntu (I had installed it already on another partition), so far everything works fine. I guess I'll try Debian on my desktop, it's probably much easier to install it there.

My objective is to get a Linux distribution running where everything works correctly, and gives me better battery life than Windows.

If you want a distro based on debian and is 100% stable, then you should try SoluOS.

Fuduntu is a distro made for laptops.

 

[PandaL]

12.10? It's buggy. I don't know what Cannonical was doing, given that they shipped with an obvious, critical defect.

I suggest trying this guide:
http://techhamlet.com/2012/11/install-nvidia-drivers-in-ubuntu-12-10/

5870 is a AMD card bro.

 

[Slavik81]

5870 is a AMD card bro.

Gah. I was thinking 580. I need sleep.

 

[b0b]

Do you mean X11 forwarding? That's not going to be a thing in wayland?

wayland has an xserver backend, so if you open an x11-program it spawns an x-session. and you could use x11-forwarding that way.
but x11-forwarding never worked (for me) properly anyway. like Slavik81 already mentioned, it's quite obsolete now...


a very good overview about wayland (without going too much into detail):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

 

[Treechopper]

When you guys speak of X11 or Wayland over network do y'all mean something along the lines of access through a remote desktop?


Also, can somebody point me to a good resource for learning about this stuff? I have a faint grasp of what's being talked about but I would love to understand more.

 

[flowsnake]

When you guys speak of X11 or Wayland over network do y'all mean something along the lines of access through a remote desktop?

It's like remote desktop except you can do it for individual applications. At least with X.

 

[GameplayWhore]

It's like remote desktop except you can do it for individual applications. At least with X.

Yeah. I have a raspberry pi (handheld server) at home, and from either home or work I type "ssh -X myname@myserver pidgin" in the run dialog, and it runs pidgin (my messaging app) as if it were on the machine I'm sitting at except that it's really running on the tiny server. No matter where I run it from, the logs and settings are kept in one place.

I do this with a few apps. It's great, because setup is incredibly minimal, and it doesn't require any hoops to jump through to call it up.

 

[Treechopper]

Yeah. I have a raspberry pi (handheld server) at home, and from either home or work I type "ssh -X myname@myserver pidgin" in the run dialog, and it runs pidgin (my messaging app) as if it were on the machine I'm sitting at except that it's really running on the tiny server. No matter where I run it from, the logs and settings are kept in one place.

I do this with a few apps. It's great, because setup is incredibly minimal, and it doesn't require any hoops to jump through to call it up.

This sounds absolutely incredible. I guess I shouldn't get used to it if it's going away though :/

 

[FLEABttn]

Got my driver issue figured out. Was a bit of a PITA. But everything works pretty nice now.

Now that I've gotten away from WoW and I got the driver figured out, Ubuntu feels pretty viable.

 

[ComputerMKII]

Jolicloud Desktop Comes to Ubuntu – And Here’s How to Install It: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/04/jolicloud-your-new-favourite-ubuntu-de

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jolicloud-team/ppa && sudo apt-get update

 

[hitsugi]

Finally switching off from Ubuntu.. after using it as my primary OS for about 3 years now.

Going the Debian route instead of Arch (which I had considered in the past). Any suggestions on which Debian to go for? I'm not the most experienced user because the ease of use with Ubuntu greatly spoiled me. I was considering either Testing or Unstable, but I do wonder how much crap I could run into running the Unstable release.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

How do I get Gnome 3.8 if I already have Ubuntu 12.10 and Gnome 3.6? >_>

 

[Massa]

How do I get Gnome 3.8 if I already have Ubuntu 12.10 and Gnome 3.6? >_>

Upgrade to Ubuntu 13.04 then use the GNOME 3 ppa.

Finally switching off from Ubuntu.. after using it as my primary OS for about 3 years now.

Going the Debian route instead of Arch (which I had considered in the past). Any suggestions on which Debian to go for? I'm not the most experienced user because the ease of use with Ubuntu greatly spoiled me. I was considering either Testing or Unstable, but I do wonder how much crap I could run into running the Unstable release.

Debian testing is what I'd recommend.

unstable is not really "unstable". It's been more reliable than official Ubuntu releases in my experience.

 

[PandaL]

Finally switching off from Ubuntu.. after using it as my primary OS for about 3 years now.

Going the Debian route instead of Arch (which I had considered in the past). Any suggestions on which Debian to go for? I'm not the most experienced user because the ease of use with Ubuntu greatly spoiled me. I was considering either Testing or Unstable, but I do wonder how much crap I could run into running the Unstable release.

I was also in the same boat and I tried lots of distros (including debian unstable) and I finally settled with Manjaro.

I suggest you to try Manjaro before moving to Debian.

Manjaro is based on Arch & is stable and the latest version 0.8.5 was released last week.

How do I get Gnome 3.8 if I already have Ubuntu 12.10 and Gnome 3.6? >_>

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

You can read more about that in this link.

http://www.ubuntukiller.com/2013/03/how-to-installupgrade-gnome-38-in.html

 

[ComputerMKII]

My computer started booting to a black screen (past the purple screen with the Ubuntu logo), no video signal. Since I couldn't solve the problem, I made the most of the opportunity and reinstalled Linux Mint.

However, I am definitely sick of random bugs. My next computer will be a Mac.

 

[Cheeto]

My computer started booting to a black screen (past the purple screen with the Ubuntu logo), no video signal. Since I couldn't solve the problem, I made the most of the opportunity and reinstalled Linux Mint.

However, I am definitely sick of random bugs. My next computer will be a Mac.

What did you change? If you didn't change something then a hardware fault is the only reason you'd get symptoms like that.

 

[ComputerMKII]

What did you change? If you didn't change something then a hardware fault is the only reason you'd get symptoms like that.

I just updated Ubuntu, as far as I remember.

 

[Massa]

My computer started booting to a black screen (past the purple screen with the Ubuntu logo), no video signal. Since I couldn't solve the problem, I made the most of the opportunity and reinstalled Linux Mint.

However, I am definitely sick of random bugs. My next computer will be a Mac.

If you're sick of random bugs, Ubuntu (and Linux Mint for that matter) are not for you.

 

[ComputerMKII]

There finally is a dedicated Facebook Messenger app: http://www.webupd8.org/2013/04/fbmessenger-stand-alone-facebook.html

 

[itxaka]

So.... latest Ubuntu daily forces you to restart after updates...start of the end?

Seriously, you can't close the windows and there is no other button than restart. Ugh.

 

[archnemesis]

That's fine as long as it doesn't reboot automatically. You can always leave the window opened in the background.

 

[zoku88]

So.... latest Ubuntu daily forces you to restart after updates...start of the end?

Seriously, you can't close the windows and there is no other button than restart. Ugh.

Is...Is this Windows?

 

[ComputerMKII]

So.... latest Ubuntu daily forces you to restart after updates...start of the end?

Seriously, you can't close the windows and there is no other button than restart. Ugh.

They don't force you to click it.

 

[Slavik81]

My computer started booting to a black screen (past the purple screen with the Ubuntu logo), no video signal. Since I couldn't solve the problem, I made the most of the opportunity and reinstalled Linux Mint.

Graphics drivers are tied to the kernel and must be recompiled when the kernel is updated. I think that should happen automatically, but... Well, I've heard a lot about how it might fail. I'm not a particularly informed Ubuntu user, but that would be my first suspicion.

 

[Dimmuxx]

So.... latest Ubuntu daily forces you to restart after updates...start of the end?

Seriously, you can't close the windows and there is no other button than restart. Ugh.

That's why xkill exist. Run xkill in a terminal and click the window.

 

[ComputerMKII]

Steam doesn't work properly since I installed Mint:

So I went to that URL but the explanation was gibberish:

OpenGL allows for different methods of handling sending rendering commands. Direct rendering is often faster and more desirable, so the Linux Steam client checks to see which mode OpenGL is running in when it starts. If it sees that OpenGL is running indirectly it will display a warning to let you know that you may want to change your configuration to allow it to run directly and thus usually with better performance. There are a few reasons why OpenGL may not be able to use direct rendering:
If you are running over a remote connection. In this case it is required to use indirect rendering.
If your OpenGL binaries or driver are misconfigured, for example if your 32-bit and 64-bit OpenGL libraries are incorrectly set up. This can happen if you have switched between compatibility and native OpenGL libraries, or if an installation or driver update failed or applied itself improperly.
In order to test whether this is an issue on your system you'll need to open a terminal window and locate the 32-bit version of glxinfo. When you run glxinfo the first few lines will say whether direct rendering is supported or not. glxinfo may also print warnings which might relate to the problem, such as a driver version mismatch. As Steam is a 32-bit binary it is important to make sure you're running the 32-bit glxinfo when you do this to match how Steam uses OpenGL. If you do not have a 32-bit glxinfo you can install the mesa-utils:i386 package.
Another way to gather useful diagnostic info is to find glxinfo and see what it will load. You can use 'which glxinfo' to find your glxinfo binary and then 'ldd glxinfo' to determine which OpenGL libraries will be loaded for it (this is also a way to distinguish a 32-bit glxinfo from a 64-bit one). Check the dependency list to see what libGL.so and driver binaries are being used and this may show mismatches or unexpected dependencies which could shed light on why OpenGL is not running in direct rendering mode.
Finally, setting the environment variable LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose can help diagnose OpenGL issues, so that output may give some clues.
Uninstalling and reinstalling your video driver is one way to try and get a fresh configuration and may correct problems such as version mismatches between kernel and user components.

After a bit of googling I've read that I could solve the problem by reinstalling my video driver. So I tried to revert back to the open-source driver but the option is greyed out:

What should I do now?

Edit: Running the uninstall script didn't work since the 'installed files were altered' so I just reinstalled the drivers with the --force option. It seems to have worked.

 

[itxaka]

They don't force you to click it.

It more about what represents than the issue with the window. I always update in the terminal.

 

[Massa]

Steam doesn't work properly since I installed Mint:

http://i.imgur.com/2jHCSqD.png[IMG]

So I went to that URL but the explanation was gibberish:



After a bit of googling I've read that I could solve the problem by reinstalling my video driver. So I tried to revert back to the open-source driver but the option is greyed out:

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/dLM8Nm9.png[IMG]

What should I do now?

Edit: Running the uninstall script didn't work since the 'installed files were altered' so I just reinstalled the drivers with the --force option. It seems to have worked.[/QUOTE]

You should never manually install drivers on a system managed by packages, this will only lead to problems (for example, your system will be unbootable once you upgrade the kernel). Always use binary packages officially built for your distribution, only manually install programs to places like /usr/local or /opt or there will be breakage sooner or later.

Do you have a 64-bit system by any chance? It looks like the problem was that you were missing the 32-bit version of the OpenGL libs.

Anyway, what font is that in your screens? Looks pretty good.

[quote="itxaka, post: 54678471"]It more about what represents than the issue with the window. I always update in the terminal.[/QUOTE]

Linux doesn't have a good solution for upgrading underlying libraries of your system, no matter what distribution. It's always a good idea to reboot, specially on a non-critical desktop system.

There was a good blog about it from a Chromium developer awhile ago but I can't find the link atm.

Basically the problem is if a program is using libfoo, and you upgrade libfoo, then that program could easily crash. On a Windows system, the program will still use the old copy of libfoo until you restart it or reboot the system.

 

[Aleph]

I'm having a hard time finding a replacement for foobar2000 under Xubuntu. So far I've been using Deadbeef, but it is lacking some features, and still is a little buggy.
And in Linux-related news, Debian 7 "Wheezy" will be releasing on the first weekend in May (link, from two days ago).

 

[archnemesis]

Spotify is quite good for playing music although it doesn't handle Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. It's fairly lightweight and the search is faster than anything else I've tried.

 

[ComputerMKII]

Always use binary packages officially built for your distribution

Isn't that what I did? I downloaded AMD's driver striaght from their website (I picked Desktop Devices -> HD Series - Radeon 7XXX -> Linux 64 bit then downloaded the archive). I didn't install the proprietary driver through Ubuntu/Mint's Software Sources interface because it was an old version, which is a big problem when you want to play games with Steam.

only manually install programs to places like /usr/local or /opt or there will be breakage sooner or later.

I didn't manipulate anything in those folders...?

Do you have a 64-bit system by any chance?

I do. Oddly enough, I had no problems with Steam on Ubuntu. I only started having the error message after I installed Mint, but the error message is gone now anyway.

Anyway, what font is that in your screens? Looks pretty good.

It's Segoe UI, aka the Metro font. Microsoft might have made a lot of shitty products in the past few years (in my opinion) but I have yet to see a better font for a user interface. It's slick as hell. Same thing with Consolas, which I use for the terminal and all my text editors.

 

[Massa]

Isn't that what I did? I downloaded AMD's driver striaght from their website (I picked Desktop Devices -> HD Series - Radeon 7XXX -> Linux 64 bit then downloaded the archive). I didn't install the proprietary driver through Ubuntu/Mint's Software Sources interface because it was an old version, which is a big problem when you want to play games with Steam.


I didn't manipulate anything in those folders...?


I do. Oddly enough, I had no problems with Steam on Ubuntu. I only started having the error message after I installed Mint, but the error message is gone now anyway.

The AMD driver installer doesn't properly create packages that integrate well with Ubuntu (or any other Linux distribution); instead, it installs and overwrites a bunch of files that your system's package manager keep track of. And since it's not tracking them and their dependencies your system will likely break when you upgrade.

With the case of kernel modules, they always have to be rebuilt for each new kernel version. When you install new kernel modules using the package manager it can keep it under control and not upgrade your system unless all extra-official modules are updated as well. But with AMD's manual script nothing is tracked, the system will go ahead with a kernel upgrade and you will end up with a blank screen.

Ubuntu provides the latest AMD drivers in a properly packaged form in the "fglrx-updates" package. Once a new AMD driver releases they'll package it, test it and make sure it's properly integrated and then it will find its way into that repository. If that's not fast enough you should instead look for some user made packages (the ppa's), but never use AMD's scripts on an actual production system. This is most likely the cause of your breakage with Ubuntu, and will happen again with Linux Mint when a new kernel version is pushed to the repositories.