[vox] Anyone installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

[Carl Boettiger]

Bill, list,

Thanks for explaining the flash situation, very enlightening.  Does this
all hold true for chromium (the open source/unbranded version of chrome) or
just google chrome?

Sounds like Ubuntu recommends some amazon S3 mirrors
<http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/ubuntu-1204-arrives-and-its-great/10836>which
to speed downloads.


-Carl

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 10:56 PM, Bill Broadley <bill at broadley.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
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-- 
Carl Boettiger
UC Davis
http://www.carlboettiger.info/
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