Image by digitalART2 via Flickr
Lucid Lynx is the new release of Ubuntu Linux operating system. We decided that it should be us testing it for you and telling you what’s new and what’s hot. This release of Ubuntu will be marked 10.04 LTS. Ubuntu is released every six months so you are always up to date with your software. LTS versions are released every two years and Canonical will be providing support for three years for every LTS release (five for servers). Let’s see what was simmering for the past six months and is due to release at the end of the April.
Here are the biggest changes that you will notice and care about:
- GNOME 2.29.92 – desktop environment that is already showing its age was again updated, unfortunately nothing major is new in the Gnome camp and for Gnome 3.0 we will have to wait at least six more months if not a whole year. Other minor changes include new default colors and re-arrangement of the title bar buttons. All three of them are on the left side of the windows, Mac OS X style. Something you will need to get used to.
- KDE SC 4.4 – No more backports, the latest and the greatest KDE release is included in Kubuntu spin-off. KDE Software Compilation 4.4 was released in the beginning of February, barely catching Lucid Lynx feature freeze. More about changes in the official announcement.
- Kernel 2.6.32 – Latest kernel is most of the time a good thing. New drivers added and old drivers fixed.
- Firefox default search engine is now Yahoo. You can still use Google, but Yahoo is now the default. Why? More income for Canonical. ;)
- New graphic drivers – Nvidia users be happy, Lucid Lynx will come with new open source drivers and three different closed source drivers. Ati users will have to stick with the open source driver for now because new fglrx driver does not support X server that is shipped with Lucid Lynx.
- Social networks – MeMenu panel for easy access to chat services and microblogging and new Gwibber microblogging client with support for many social networks. From now on only fire will force you to leave your house.
Installation & First Impression
Installation inside a VirtualBox was much slower compared to the installation of Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala which we performed on the same hardware inside the same VirtualBox. Apart from that, there are no significant differences between Karmic and Lucid installer. Everything looks almost the same and ext4 is still the default file system. If there are any under the hood changes in the installer we did not notice them.
After the reboot, first thing you will notice is the new look. User interface evolved a little, but nothing revolutionary new. Screen locking is now enabled by default. We had to try and see how Gwibber and MeMenu work. After couple of hours we can say that both are still a little awkward to use and they both lack certain features.
MeMenu
MeMenu is an attempt to integrate social networks into the Gnome Desktop. You can add two types of accounts to MeMenu: chat accounts (AIM, Yahoo, Jabber, MSN Messenger, …) and broadcast accounts (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, FriendFeed, …). From MeMenu you can then change online presence for chat accounts and you can send status updates to your broadcast accounts. Unfortunately the former happens with no visible feedback and you really don’t know if you actually posted anything or not, beside that, you do not know if you are changing your status on chat account or you are broadcasting something1. Doing both at the same time is something that we will not like.
Another thing that bothered us is the fact that you cannot use MeMenu to start Empathy or Gwibber. It is even worse than that, MeMenu is inactive until you start Empathy by yourself. When you close Empathy MeMenu will still show you as online and you are still able to change your status and receive messages. The problem is that notifications about the new messages pop up as balloons and you cannot click on them2 to open chat window and you cannot open chat in MeMenu, you need to run Empathy again.
If you miss the balloon notification you missed the message. There is no indicator that you have messages waiting, again you need to open Empathy to see the blinking icon beside your contact.
Gwibber
Integration of Gwibber and MeMenu could be better. As we said before, there is no indication of what you are doing when you are entering text inside the input field in MeMenu. Gwibber by itself is a completely different story altogether. It is already usable but I would be careful before calling it beta.
It lacks a lot of features, for example sending direct messages on Twitter. You can see all your direct messages, received and sent, but you cannot send new direct messages with a simple click. There is no option to send direct message. If there is, it managed to stay hidden from us.
Beside that, there are no separate settings for retrieving public tweets, @ replies and direct messages. So if you set retrieval time to 1 minute all three types of tweets will be picked up every minute which means that you will reach your API limit in less than an hour3. Preview of images uploaded on twitpic or on other picture posting sites would be nice too. Option to post images that are automatically uploaded to twitpic would be pushing it.
Gwibber is a nice start, but it still needs time to develop and we have to give it time since there are no decent and native Twitter clients for Linux. Adobe Air apps do not count.
Is that it?
Mostly yes, there are not many major changes, which is good, because we are looking at the LTS release. It appears that social networks are becoming a part of our working environments and if half a year ago cell phones started to support them on a larger scale, desktops are now following.
Among other changes it is also worth mentioning that HAL4 was thrown out and it was replaced by Devicekit which should result in faster boot. Gimp was removed from the default installation. You can install it later at any time with Synaptic package manager or with command line utilities. Obligatory change in splash screen and GDM background is also here. The latest release is a step forward into the right direction, but we cannot help in feeling that Ubuntu 10.04 was rushed out at least half a year if not one whole year too soon. MeMenu and Gwibber need some more polishing and few features are still missing. Features that cannot be added after the feature freeze with beta1 release at our doorstep.
During the test we also noticed that VirtualBox’s Guest Additions cannot be installed on Lucid Lynx. Kernel modules fail to compile, but this is probably because of the new kernel and older version of VirtualBox.
