[vox] Anyone installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[Bill Broadley]

On 04/26/2012 02:44 PM, Carl Boettiger wrote:
> installed today (thanks to UCD's mirror).

Happy to be of service, at least if it was mine.  Actually I thought our
ISOs were used to populate at least one of the other mirrors as well.
GigE + torrent makes for quick downloads.... hopefully I helped out a
few others that way as well.  Sad that ubuntu handles releases so
poorly, they wait 12-24 hours for mirrors to sync, then they are
horribly overloaded anyways.  Is an RSS feed of the torrents as soon as
they are ready too much to ask?

> First impressions: no problems,
> fast & stable.  Unity is very responsive & the HUD is neat.

I like unity in general, but I *HATE* the global menu.  Seems great for
a tablet/netbook where you run everything fullscreen.  Not to much if
you gasp have a few dozen windows/tabs/terminals and don't want to play
the race to the top of the screen for the menu constantly, god forbid
you want to turn off click to focus.  It becomes a silly game of
landmines and you have to try to make it to the top of the screen
without mousing over any other window.

I did find:
http://www.liberiangeek.net/2012/04/disable-the-global-menu-in-ubuntu-12-04-precise-pangolin/

But I've not tried it yet.

> There's some buzz<http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/04/ubuntu-12-04-released/>about
> adobe handing linux flash off to google, leaving us to require chrome
> for a browser fully supporting flash?  Thoughts on this?

I'm bit vague on the details, hopefully someone will chime in if I'm wrong.

Basically the old flash interface SUCKED.  It assumed a single brower
process, running on a single CPU, and was tightly integrated.  The had
several undesirable effects:
* You couldn't use a second CPU core
* Fullscreen video didn't often work/was too slow
* You couldn't use any video acceleration
* If flash crashed your browser crashed
* Memory leaks/CPU spun busy would require restarting the browser often.
* Flash could corrupt memory... of the browser and crash it.
* Tiny changes in flash *OR* the browser would change how well it
  worked, often requiring users to play the M*N combinations to try to
  find something approximating stable.


Chrome came out with a radically better browser.  Separation between the
main part of the browser per tab rendering engine.  As well as
separating the per tab rendering engine and plugins like flash It was
multi-cpu friendly and could often (not always) survive a crash in a
tab.  To achieve this they brought out a new API that allowed flash to
run in it's own process.  This provided protection of browser memory,
allowed multiple CPUs to work etc.

Adobe was happy, this let flash apps run better, and provided a better
user experience at minimal engineering cost to them.

Firefox had a competing API, got all pissy and offended, and announced
they would *NEVER* support the new flash/chrome API because there's was
plenty good (but didn't have flash).

Not sure anyone cares at this point though, seems like the same devel
tools that make it easy/popular to have zillions of flash widgets on the
web will soon (if not already) spit out HTML5 to do the same thing and
*gasp* work with the zillion of android/IOS widgets out there.