As usual, I ran the installer from a bootable USB drive created with Ubuntu’s Startup Disk Creator. Ubiquity, the Ubuntu installer, is more polished than ever in this release. It can now turn on the webcam to take an account picture, which worked perfectly with the built in webcam. I encountered two minor installer bugs: an incorrect report that the system’s name already exists on the network, and the window becoming taller than the screen.

I wish that I could have aborted the language pack downloads during the install. Since the repository mirror was slow, they took over an hour to fetch.

Disk IO seems to really slow the system down. The Eee PC 901 has dual solid state drives: one 4 GB and one 16 GB which is slightly slower. This time, I installed Ubuntu to the slower but larger drive because I’ve had trouble keeping enough free space while installed to the smaller one. I might have to switch back to the faster drive to speed things up again. Using Chromium is a big improvement to Firefox, which freezes up briefly while accessing the disk. Even without the disk issue, Unity feels a bit sluggish on this 3 year old netbook. There’s a noticeable delay drawing menus and opening the dash.

There are a few bugs to work out:

• Dragging with the touchpad is now very difficult. [Update: I've written 2 posts on fixing this and swapping right and middle click]
• I had the touchpad stop working entirely once (a USB mouse continued working). I haven’t been able to reproduce this.
• I couldn’t get the launcher to appear with the mouse after it auto-hid. After closing the windows I had open, the problem went away. I haven’t been able to reproduce this.
• The system seems to have started randomly having kernel panics today. One happened while copying a file to a flash drive, and another while filling out the bug report for the first. [Update: Here's the latest bug report]

I’ve never had a problem with Ubuntu as severe as the kernel panic crashes. Fortunately I don’t rely on the netbook for much right now.

Install PowerTOP from the package powertop (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install powertop

PowerTOP is a text-based application. Open a terminal and run this command to start it:
sudo powertop

Powertop will monitor your system for five seconds to gather information before starting.

The top left section of the interface shows the different CPU states, and how long your CPU was in each one. You want your CPU to use the highest C state (sleep state) as much as possible to save energy.

The top right section of the interface shows the different frequencies that your CPU supports (P-states). Your CPU should be using the lowest frequency available while it is idle to save power.

The line highlighted red shows the wakeups-from-idle per second number. Wakeups-from-idle per second shows you how often the CPU is woken up from idle by the processes on your system. You want this to be as low as possible to conserve power.

The top causes for wakeups list is the most important part of PowerTOP, it shows which processes are preventing your system from saving power. The lines shown in bold are the ones PowerTOP thinks are the most important.

Suggestions for reducing wakeups (and therefore saving power) are shown the the bottom of the window. There should be a shortcut key to temporarily apply the suggestion shown below.

To use less power, take PowerTOP’s suggestions and analyze the top causes for wakeups list and decide if you can disable some of the software or hardware on the list.

The top causes for wakeups on my Eee PC 901 running Ubuntu are the Bluetooth radio (BT-253), sound (HDA Intel), and WiFi radio (ra0). These account for about 85% of the wakeups. Initially I was getting about 170 wakeups/sec, and about 150 wakeups/sec after applying two suggestions that PowerTOP offered for the system.

[update] Commenter vor has linked to a guide he wrote on improving battery life, which includes setting up a script which runs when the power state changes. This script can be used to more permanently implement PowerTOP’s suggestions.

Gnash is an open source alternative to Abobe’s proprietary Flash player. It has support for the older SWF v7 Flash format and SWF 8 and 9 are in development. Gnash is part of the GNU project.

Swfdec is a similar project licensed under the LGPL.

I started both of my tests by browsing to a YouTube video page. Firefox would prompt me here to install a plugin to view the video.

I think that Adobe’s Flash should be set as the default in Firefox’s plugin finder to avoid confusing new users. The advantages and disadvantages of each player should be made clear.

I started with the default selection, Swfdec. The installation went by without any trouble and the current page was automatically refreshed. The first thing I noticed about Swfdec was that any Flash applets have to be clicked before they run, which a nice feature.

Immediately after clicking to play the YouTube video, Firefox prompted me to search for a suitable codec. I selected to install all of the offered packages. After the quick install, the YouTube video and sound played flawlessly. The video controls all worked, with the exception of the volume meter which did nothing.

Video site number two, Vimeo, didn’t work so well. Playing a video resulted in a no video found error. You’ll have the most luck with the most popular video sites that the developers have focused on. Simple menus and banners worked fine, but I couldn’t find any games that worked.

Next, I installed Gnash the same way. Again, the page refreshed and Gnash tried to play the YouTube video. However, Gnash couldn’t play any video and couldn’t even render the YouTube player properly.

Vimeo videos rendered as a gray box with no error. The only Flash content I was able to get working with Gnash was some simple animations and menus.

Swfdec is clearly ahead of Gnash at the moment, but most Linux users are still not going to be interested in either; they don’t support most of the Flash content on the web. However, for users who don’t have Flash support on their CPU architecture, or want a completely open source desktop, these options are still useful. They’ll get you by on sites using Flash for navigation, and even for basic Flash video on major sites.

Adobe recently removed the restrictions on use of the Flash SWF file specifications as well as the licensing fees. The Swfdec developers so far have said that the new specifications aren’t too important, but it’s good now that the legality of their work is sorted out. Hopefully now the developers of these two projects can concentrate on building an excellent open source Flash player.

The good news, what’s been fixed:

• When I first installed the beta, Firefox 3′s Java plugin didn’t work.
• I use Nautilus as a SSH client for transferring files. I could connect to a server, but after a few seconds the connection would stop working:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/208056
• Prism applications weren’t using favicons for window icons:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/prism/+bug/205782
• My arrow keys would get stuck down in some games:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/194214

What’s not fixed:

• After installing an updated kernel today (April 1), new linux-ubuntu-modules and linux-restricted-modules have not been uploaded so booting the newer kernel causes problems with drivers. I’ve selected the older kernel in the boot menu for now:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/210267
  [update] now fixed.
• Occasionally Compiz will display pink window shadows or no shadows or all. This seems like a problem with the Nvidia driver:
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/194851
  [update] here’s a workaround

This is the first Ubuntu beta release that I’ve tested as my primary OS, but it seems to me that the beta is going well. What’s been bugging you in Ubuntu 8.04?

AIR requires a fairly recent Linux distribution, GNOME or KDE, and a RPM or Debian package management system. To get transparency effects, you need a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Metacity with compositing.

To install AIR you need to run Adobe’s installer. Download the installer:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air_linux.html

Open a terminal and change to the directory where you downloaded AIR, in my case, the desktop:
cd Desktop

Set the installer file as executable:
chmod +x adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

And run it:
./adobeair_linux_a1_033108.bin

After the install, you’ll find the Adobe AIR Application Installer under the Applications->Other menu. This simply opens a GNOME file dialog for you to browse to a AIR application to install. AIR installer files (.air) are associated with the installer, so you can just double click them to install.

Adobe provides some sample applications, I installed the ScreenBoard sample (lets you annotate anywhere on the screen), which worked well. It’s launcher was added to a new Application menu category called AIR Examples.

Two unoffical AIR applications, DiggTop and WebSnapshot, failed to install because the files were reported to be corrupt.

Next I attempted to install Pownce’s AIR application, just because I think it’s one of the best known. I don’t have an account, but from what I could test it’s working.

Adobe has come though after promising AIR for Linux for since the Windows and Mac versions were released. It’s not yet compatible with all AIR applications, and there aren’t that many to begin with. AIR is definitely alpha-quality, if you don’t need it for a specific application then you shouldn’t bother to install it yet.

Now, I have a question. The AIR installer requires root privileges to install to /opt. I ran it as my normal user, and was not prompted for my sudo password. The install still completed. Anyone else notice this or know what’s going on?

Once the beta was out, I was ready to install it on my computer as my main OS (the alphas were pretty stable, but there have been some major bugs). I wanted wipe out all the bits of software I’ve installed that have been building up since I installed Ubuntu 7.10. So I opted for a clean install. If you don’t have a separate home partition now, think about setting your system up with one. It makes doing a clean install painless.

The live-CD detected my widescreen monitor’s resolution correctly with the 2D “nv” driver. The install went fine, although I noticed that the timezone selector map has been changed so it’s difficult to select or see the cities. The install also went quickly, only taking seven minutes to copy files and configure the new system while I browsed in Firefox.

The installed system boots from the boot menu to the login screen in 30 seconds on my recent desktop PC. Once I logged in, my desktop looked exactly the same as in the old installation because I had kept the same user from my home directory. I moved all the hidden dot configuration files into another folder so I could use the new default desktop.

I have a Nvidia Geforce 8600GT-DDR3 graphics card. With Ubuntu 7.10, I had to manually install the driver because the one in the repositories was out of date. With this beta, after my first login I was asked if I wanted to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver. After it installed and I rebooted, Compiz started up and worked flawlessly.

The default theme is Human-Murrine, which hasn’t grown on me. I do like the heron wallpaper and matching login screen, as well as the subtle orange shadow behind windows. There’s also a cool zooming effect when using application launchers with the GNOME panel.

There’s a new clock applet (intlclock) that can display a map with the time in multiple locations and the weather. When I set it up with my location, the clock put the map marker in the center at the coordinates 0 , 0. If you don’t enter coordinates for a location (it’s marked as optional in the dialog) the map marker will be displayed in the center of the map. It would be nice if it could guess a location’s coordinates using a web service or just from the timezone.

I used the package ubuntu-restricted-extras to install audio/video codecs, DVD playback, Java, Flash, and fonts. I am enjoying the latest version of Flash which has GTK and fullscreen support. However, the Java plugin that gets installed doesn’t work in Firefox 3.

I ran into two more minor bugs. By default, mousing over an audio file will begin to play a preview of it. The problem is, I deleted a file while this preview was going, and it wouldn’t stop. The AptURL handler, which lets you install packages via links in Firefox, seems to be broken in Firefox 3.

Ubuntu 8.04, even the beta, is an exceptional release. I got my system nearly perfectly set up without any command line work or significant issues. If you’ve been considering installing and testing the Ubuntu 8.04 Beta, go ahead and it will likely work just fine.

Lotus Symphony requires 750 MB of disk space and 512 MB of memory. During my test I never saw it go above Firefox’s memory usage, but it does use significantly more that OpenOffice 2.3. 256 MB of RAM would probably run it just fine.

Before downloading the 275 MB binary installer, IBM wants you to give them a name and email address. The installer will not work if Compiz is running. I downloaded the installer to my desktop and used these commands to switch to the directory, mark the installer as executable, and run it:
cd ~/Desktop
chmod +x IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin
sudo ./IBM_Lotus_Symphony_linux.bin

Currently, the default install will cause Lotus Symphony to die silently when it is run. Use this command to fix some permissions and solve the problem (replace username with your username):
sudo chown -R username ~/.lotus/

Instead of the using the traditional way of separate windows for each application and document, Lotus Symphony is completely tab-based. There are 4 components: Home (buttons to create new documents and support links), Web Browser, Documents, Presentations, and Spreadsheets.

The interface would be much better than OpenOffice’s except for that the UI widget use a Windows 95 theme. The interface has also been nicely simplified, but many menus and dialogs will still look familiar to OpenOffice users.

The web browser could be useful for opening for opening links from documents, or doing quick research. But loading most websites causes it to crash and display a huge error dialog. Am I the only one with this problem?

The word processing component does everything I need. It opens my OpenDocument files created with OpenOffice correctly, except for the some issues with page margins and fonts sizes being slightly larger.

I don’t create many presentations, but the presentation component seems to be adequate. I do use spreadsheets in OpenOffice for often for creating charts, and Lotus Symphony’s chart wizard is identical.

Lotus Symphony is showing a lot of promise. I like the tabbed interface a lot, as well as the updated look and simplified interface. On the other hand, Lotus Symphony is also slow, buggy, closed source, and uses non-native widgets. The current version is only a beta, so I will give it another go well the next update is released.

Picasa is software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your computer. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize.

Going to the official website, picasa.google.com, I saw no mention of the Linux version. A Google search brought me to the Linux site where I downloaded the DEB package for Picasa 2.7 beta. I hope that once it’s out of beta, Picasa for Linux will be available on the main website.

After the installation, the Picasa launcher was added to Applications->Other rather than a proper submenu. Launching Picasa caused nothing to happen for about 30 seconds until the license agreement opened.

The ugly interface widgets and gray background give Picasa away as a Wine application. Luckily, most of Picasa uses non-native widgets which look fine. The media detection worked perfectly and alerted me to new photos.

I found Picasa for Linux to be polished and working well despite running on top of Wine. In depth instructions for installing Picasa can be found here.

CNR.com is a free one-click software delivery service designed to standardize the process and eliminate the complexity of finding, installing and managing Linux software for the most popular desktop Linux distributions, both Debian and RPM based.

I installed the required CNR client software for Ubuntu 7.10 by downloading the available DEB package. After installing it, a CNR launcher was added to my Application menu under System Tools. Clicking it opened CNR.com in Firefox and asked me if it could update my software. Was CNR trying to overwrite Ubuntu’s packages with its own? I clicked no to the dialog.

On the CNR website I navigated to the game Supertux and clicked the Install Now button. Firefox asked me if I wanted to open SuperTux.cnr with CNR.

After clicking OK, the install began immediately. CNR downloaded and installed SuperTux

SuperTux was added to the Applications menu and worked fine.

I noticed that CNR was running in the notification area. Right-clicking on the icon gave me access to the preferences. The manage software tab showed all the software installed by CNR, and that the version of SuperTux it installed was actually packaged by Ubuntu. All CNR had done was the equivalent of sudo apt-get install supertux.

I removed CNR by uninstalling SuperTux in the CNR Client software and removing the package cnr-client in Synaptic.

As for making software installation easy, CNR is trying to solve a problem that Ubuntu doesn’t have. Ubuntu’s repositories are excellent, and installing software is easy with Synaptic, Add/Remove, and the AptURL protocol handler.

Installing software not in the repository is easy with DEB packages being common. Downloaded packages are opened with the installer by default, which makes installation just as easy as CNR. GetDeb.net is an excellent source for recent software that is not in the repositories.

CNR’s web catalog does offer interactive features such as screenshots, reviews, and ratings. This is much nicer than Add/Remove’s simple popularity ratings and descriptions.

While CNR’s user interaction features are promising, it doesn’t have enough of an advantage over Ubuntu’s tools to make me use it.

Freeciv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization. The game commences in prehistory and your mission is to lead your tribe from the stone age to the space age…

The latest 2.1.0 release of Freeciv has been in development for almost two years. Packages for Ubuntu 7.10 are available at GetDeb. You need to install freeciv-data, freeciv-server, and freeciv-client-gtk in that order. Freeciv is added to the GNOME menu under Games.

The GTK game client makes it easy to set up a single or multiplayer game. Widgets have been styled to give them a nice Freeciv theme. The default tileset in the game is nice, but it lacks animations such as those in Civilization 3.

Freeciv is not as easy to learn as the commercial Civilization games. Selecting and moving units can be tricky, as well as knowing where to look for messages. But don’t be put off by this, read the client documentation and you will quickly be ready to play.

If you are a fan of the Civilization series, like me, you will enjoy playing Freeciv. The graphics are not comparable to the most recent commercial games but it is still a blast to play.