Best Ubuntu Innovations of 2008
2008 was a great year. The United States got a new president. I got a college degree, complete with the associated crushing personal debt (a nice complement to the crushing national debt incurred by my country). More importantly, however, new features were introduced to Ubuntu and Linux. Although it comes a bit belatedly (today being the first day of 2009), here’s a list of my favorite innovations in 2008:
- Better wireless drivers Wireless in Linux used to be a mess. It’s still not always pretty, but thanks to the new wireless stack, things are much better. In particular, the inclusion since Ubuntu 8.04 of the b43 driver for Broadcom cards and iwl3945/iwl4965 for Intel chips has rendered my ndiswrapper days a distant memory. For Atheros users, vast improvements to madwifi, especially on 64-bit systems, were a nice touch in 8.10.
- Network Manager 0.7 For a long time, my first response to users who complained about being unable to connect to wireless networks in Ubuntu was, “Have you tried wicd?” With due respect to the wicd developers, Network Manager in Intrepid now wins hands down in terms of features, including easy-to-configure VPN and WPA-enterprise access. Even more impressive, for the first time since 2004, Network Manager actually works reliably.
- kvm The kernel-based virtual-machine infrastructure was officially integrated into Ubuntu 8.04, making it simpler to virtualize efficiently at a low level. The 8.10 Server Edition even includes nice packages for easily working with kvm. Who wants to pay for VMware or fight with half-baked Xen when kvm tools are only an apt-get away?
- X.Org 7.4 Around 1998, it ceased to be fashionable to hack configuration files in order to get your monitor to work. Yet X continued to rely until quite recently on an arcane text file to store its settings. In Ubuntu 8.10 (and to a lesser extent in 8.04), X finally auto-detects settings, meaning that truly plug-and-play video has come to Linux, if a bit belatedly.
- Printing to PDF It’s long been possible to configure a PDF printer manually in Ubuntu. But since 8.04, one has been included out-of-the-box. This is a great feature that makes my life a lot easier when I need, for example, to save a web page in a readable format that I can send to others easily.
- Better Gnome clock The clock in the Gnome panel has always been good at displaying the time and date. But since Ubuntu 8.04, it also tells me the weather, and whether the sun has set, without my having to look outside. With features like these, who needs windows?
A lot of these features, of course, come from upstream developers, not Ubuntu itself. All the same, they’ve helped to refine the desktop experience considerably. I look forward to discovering what Ubuntu 9.* will bring.
WorksWithU Contributing Blogger Christopher Tozzi is a PhD student at a major U.S. university. Tozzi has extensive hands-on experience with Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition. WorksWithU is updated multiple times per week. Don’t miss a single post. Sign up for our RSS and Twitter feeds (available now) and newsletter (launching January 2009).
I’d mention Gufw (http://gufw.tuxfamily.org/index.html) and GScrot (http://gscrot.ubuntu-projekte.de/) – both are tools that were created on Ubuntu by the Ubuntu community.
I was hoping to find Canonical-specific things here. The ‘innovation’ comes from peers.
“In Ubuntu 8.10 (and to a lesser extent in 8.04), X finally auto-detects settings, meaning that truly plug-and-play video has come to Linux, if a bit belatedly.”
And it does a piss poor job at it.
Ubuntu 8.04 doesn’t even support my 19″ monitor. i have to use config file so it works properly for playing fullscreen apps.
Ubuntu 8.10 ignores the config all together and breaks monitor and nvidia card.
Year 2008 was year of break video support in Ubuntu. And no one still never fixed it.
The Xorg project changed the way the X server works. But it’s not hard to fix. If you have an SLI set up it doesn’t just pick one as the default. You need to tell it which one to use.
The ignoring of the config file is another Xorg project change. They want to dump the config file completely.
As for innovation. Most users won’t have even noticed the stuff that was listed. The innovations I wanted to see, like consumer targeted applications, didn’t arrive. Canonical seem to be firmly focused on delivering the OS and basic applications only. They need to stop trying to be Red Hat and realise their market is with consumers. That would be a genuine innovation in the Linux world.
I agree on the wireless improvements. Having a laptop with a Broadcom card I have always struggled with wireless, but with the new driver and also with Network Manager, well actually managing my networks it is bliss without having to install WICD. Have to say I’m in the boat with others about video. There have been some improvements, but dual monitor set up really shouldn’t take days, but hey its getting better all the time.
aikiwolfie: just curious what you mean by ‘consumer targeted applications’. Do you think Canonical should become more directly involved in the development of stuff like OpenOffice?
As for the issues with video, I’ve heard of lots of people having problems with the new X situation, although I’ve had none myself (maybe because I use only Intel video cards, which have open-source drivers, and have no dual-monitors to deal with). But I think it’s good that X has finally moved away from the xorg.conf file, even if it’s led to new problems. You should still be able to use xorg.conf if necessary, but it’s nice not to have to deal with it if you’re lucky enough to have X auto-detect your settings properly.
I think Canonical should realise it’s core market at the moment are home users and start producing or sponsoring or doing something to get applications onto the desktop instead of just focusing on the OS.
Yes we have a web browser and an office suite and e-mail clients. But we also need things like a decent suit of so called “life style applications”. Linux doesn’t have a decent easy to use video editing application. Similarly photo editing? Should we use the Gimp? That’s a bit of a learning curve.
What about games and entertainment? Nexiuz is great but I want more than one game or one type of game. I want to be playing something that isn’t half finished and can compete with the best of what’s available elsewhere. Have you watched a blu-ray movie on a Linux box yet?
Canonical don’t have to write the applications. But they do need to promote their platform to developers. An OS without applications is pointless.
Canonical wants to play in Red-Hats and Novells back yard. But they aren’t making they headway they should be in that arena. They do have a huge loyal following on the desktop though.
The problem with X seems to affect mostly people with ATI cards or people with SLI setups.
I think my earlier comment on here got moderated away because of two links.
One problem with 8.10, based on a newer kernel, is the inability [or great difficulty] to get webcams to work. There are many posts in the Ubuntu forums about this. Because of that, Skype can’t be used to make video calls. Supposedly it worked OK in 8.04. Again, while not necessarily a Canonical problem, items like this are deal-killers for Linux use by “average” [aka Windows] users, because these aren’t issues with Windows.
I still haven’t got wifi sorted out. I have an old Compaq R3010US with a Broadcom –May their skivvy shorts be starched with epoxy glue!– 4309 wifi card, and every major Ubuntu version has brought a fresh hassle with ndiswrapper. In all of the previous ones, I got back to my wireless LAN within a day or two. Not so in 8.10. None of my old incantations works. I even tried the b43/fwcutter route, though that never worked for me. Eventually, someone will release a fix, or maybe I will find a Linux-compatible wifi card. Until then, this laptop is tied to my router with a cable.
Steve: some quick googling suggests that your card was supported by the bcm43xx driver (which is deprecated) since 2007, which implies that it should now work using b43. I’d definitely encourage you to look around ubuntuforums.org for instructions on making your card work, or start a new thread if you can’t find any.
Although Broadcom cards were traditionally very problematic in Linux, the situation has improved drastically over the last year. And of course, there’s always ndiswrapper if b43 won’t work.
hi christopher,
can’t agree on the wireless thing.
i have much trouble with the new iwl3945 driver,
so i have to use the old ipw3945 🙁
sad because i love ubuntu and gnu/linux
best regards
andreas
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