Ubuntu 14.10 Officially Released

[Luke]

MATE works great on Ubuntu, can be made to look a lot like Cinnamon with some hacks

Yeah I need to get MATE myself. I recently upgraded to 14.04 and not only does it have some of the same bugs as 12.04, but now you can't even move the damn window controls to the right.

I recently switched from Cinnamon to MATE because of short, random video freezes lasting just a few frames triggered by having run Firefox. MATE works very well indeed in Ubuntu, even works well on a tiny netbook I normally ran with IceWM, and also is good on the big video editing boxes. No more video playback/window redrawing micro-stutter, far lighter and faster code path using real compiled binaries instead of all those JS files forked from GNOME 3.

Install MATE right from repo on 14.10 or later (PPA before that), set the panel to your liking, select MATE as your default session, and you are done if you do not need a fancy window manager. Set Marco to enable composition (I think that's the default) so you can use rgba graphics on the desktop unless using really old hardware. Of course in the old days on good hardware we had compiz with GNOME 2, this is not so easy anymore but can be done. Now I will explain how to do a stunning and very smooth running compiz-MATE with gorgeous cairo-dock menus. This is to work around GTK theming limitations and upstream changes that have made compiz harder to support.

You can run MATE with compiz, just like in the old days. in Dconf (with MATE 18) go to org/mate/desktop/session/required-components and replace "marco" with "compiz" in the window manager string. You have Compiz installed by default in upstream Ubuntu, but won't in a MATE respin. Since I do not have Unity installed, I do not know if compiz will use the "default" profile or will also start Unity, however. With Unity not installed, upstream GNOME or MATE changes (not sure which) cause an ugly window border theme bug: metacity/marco can no longer communicate the window border theme to compiz! The only fix is to install Emerald and theme it yourself to match your metacity/marco theme. Expect to take hours doing this but only have to do it once.

Next up, mate-panel uses normal GTK widgets for menus, etc and unlike GNOME or Cinnamon cannot be separately themed except for the panel itself(not the menus). Because of that, I ended up using cairo-dock to draw the menu, launchers, and system tray, launched from a script bearing the command

cairo-dock --keep-above

so it would alway be rendered over a portion of the mate-panel I keep empty, Now it looks a lot line Cinnamon with the GNOME theme but performs like MATE and compiz do, with no stutter, and very smooth window management and even smooth transition to the compiz-expo workspace overview that works like the one in Cinnamon but so much smoother,

[rbmorse]

32-bit uefi

Is there somewhere an ISO of Ubuntu (or better also for Xubuntu) that supports 32-bit UEFI and installing with support for it?

I thought UEFI was 64-bit only.

[Gusar]

I thought UEFI was 64-bit only.

Nope. Some of the first Macbooks as well as some Baytrail machines have 32bit UEFI. Which is quite funny when you consider that those Baytrail machines have 64bit CPUs.

[riklaunim]

Most Win 8 tablets, and quite likely most cheap BayTrail laptops. It makes installing Linux there hard :P http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...KH-BAYTRAILS90 - from USB Xubuntu burned via Rufus app (UEFI 32 bootable).

[mmstick]

Acually, scratch that; it's not 5 releases.

It's 7 friggin kernel releases.

I first experienced in in v3.11. 3.12 didn't solve anything. 3.13 seemingly stopped the gpu lockups.

3.14-3.15 --> no luck on my end. And based on what I am seeing, 3.16 - 3.18rc are all no good as well.

7 kernel releases and the problem remains unfixed. So much for "Linux is ready for the desktop".

3.14 works fine with my Radeon HD 7950. All other kernels work as long as you disable DPM.

[Sonadow]

3.14 works fine with my Radeon HD 7950. All other kernels work as long as you disable DPM.

Disablibg dpm does not work for embedded graphics like the one in my Kabini machine.

It doesnt even support dpm to begin with.

[johnc]

I recently switched from Cinnamon to MATE because of short, random video freezes lasting just a few frames triggered by having run Firefox. MATE works very well indeed in Ubuntu, even works well on a tiny netbook I normally ran with IceWM, and also is good on the big video editing boxes. No more video playback/window redrawing micro-stutter, far lighter and faster code path using real compiled binaries instead of all those JS files forked from GNOME 3.

Install MATE right from repo on 14.10 or later (PPA before that), set the panel to your liking, select MATE as your default session, and you are done if you do not need a fancy window manager. Set Marco to enable composition (I think that's the default) so you can use rgba graphics on the desktop unless using really old hardware. Of course in the old days on good hardware we had compiz with GNOME 2, this is not so easy anymore but can be done. Now I will explain how to do a stunning and very smooth running compiz-MATE with gorgeous cairo-dock menus. This is to work around GTK theming limitations and upstream changes that have made compiz harder to support.

You can run MATE with compiz, just like in the old days. in Dconf (with MATE 18) go to org/mate/desktop/session/required-components and replace "marco" with "compiz" in the window manager string. You have Compiz installed by default in upstream Ubuntu, but won't in a MATE respin. Since I do not have Unity installed, I do not know if compiz will use the "default" profile or will also start Unity, however. With Unity not installed, upstream GNOME or MATE changes (not sure which) cause an ugly window border theme bug: metacity/marco can no longer communicate the window border theme to compiz! The only fix is to install Emerald and theme it yourself to match your metacity/marco theme. Expect to take hours doing this but only have to do it once.

Next up, mate-panel uses normal GTK widgets for menus, etc and unlike GNOME or Cinnamon cannot be separately themed except for the panel itself(not the menus). Because of that, I ended up using cairo-dock to draw the menu, launchers, and system tray, launched from a script bearing the command

cairo-dock --keep-above

so it would alway be rendered over a portion of the mate-panel I keep empty, Now it looks a lot line Cinnamon with the GNOME theme but performs like MATE and compiz do, with no stutter, and very smooth window management and even smooth transition to the compiz-expo workspace overview that works like the one in Cinnamon but so much smoother,

Thanks for the write-up. I actually spent all of last night just trying to figure out how to get my compiz settings (gconf) imported into the new gsettings framework used in Ubuntu 14.04, and failed. When I upgraded to 14.04 none of my desktop settings moved over. It's obvious that Canonical has done a lot of "work" on compiz in recent years and has been the only contributor and it seems this project has become a bit of a Canonical-only window manager (soon to be abandoned altogether, too). But that isn't going to stop me as I would really like to give MATE+compiz a try. I've been using Unity for two years on my dev box and gnome2+compiz for 4 years on my daily driver and Unity just isn't cutting it for me.

All these gnome3 DEs seem really heavy and slow for some reason too.

[wellsb]

mythbuntu

If anyone is interested, I can report that 14.10 breaks Haswell HD 5000 OpenGL in MythTV on my Intel NUC.

1) mythbuntu 14.04.1 with mythtv 27.4 and distro i965/vaapi driver

• a) vaapi works with very low cpu but poor deinterlacing and fast motion flicker makes ice hockey and football unwatchable
• b) xv-blit works ok but with high CPU and grainy HD video with a little flicker
• c) mythffmpeg with opengl and Kernel 2x/1x deinterlacer works with cpu in the 20% range and great video with only a tiny bit of flicker that is only noticeable if you look for it

2) In place Distro upgrade to 14.10 (keeping all mythtv at 27.4) ran fine with everything updating without errors however:

• a) vaapi now has very poor video in fast motion and the same poor deinterlacing
• b) xv-blit has unwatchable flicker
• c) mythffmpeg with opengl with any deinterlacer (or none) will spike 1 of 4 cpus to 100% (specific cpu moves around) and stutters every second with a video freeze of a second followed by a slow stutter forward and repeat.
• d) tried compton compositor and it eliminated some of the flicker in xv-blit but still not useable

3) Fresh install of Kubuntu with mythtv 27.4 experienced same issues as #2 however the KDE desktop was so slow it made it unusable so this is a 2nd graphics issue in 14.10

4) Fresh install of Ubuntu-Mate.org with mythtv 27.4 experienced same issues as #2.9

• a) A very nice green tinted desktop theme though the interface was unexpectedly slow (I've use Mate on Mint 13/14) with icons not populating the menus quickly (Mate is usually very fast so this is another issue with the Intel video drivers in Ubuntu 14.10)
• b) Tried oibaf ppa with latest drivers/mesa with same issues except now xv-blit and vaapi both have a solid line/vsync issue about 10% of the way down from the top of the screen.
• c) Tried oibaf ilo driver by editing xorg.conf and that made the entire desktop run perfectly smooth with fast drawing icons, but it kills vaapi (vainfo cannot detect a driver) and does not improve the opengl issues.
• d) Tried updating to 3.17 ubuntu kernel and then 3.17.1 ubuntu kernel with no improvement
• e) Upgraded to latest mythtv 28.0 in case MythTV was the issue but no luck

5) Reinstalled mythbuntu 14.0.4.1 with all updates and the vaapi/i965 distro files but no distro upgrade

• a) Installed latest mythtv 28.0 and now I can use opengl with kernel 2x deinterlacer with low cpu% and good video quality again.

I do not know if the problem is Kernel, mesa, xorg, (I tried newer versions of each) or some other part that was upgraded but I know there is one or more bugs in there. I verified through the xorg log that it was Identifying the Intel Haswell HD 5000 and registering DRI2 and DRI3 along with SNA. I thought it was perhaps MythTV but KDE was unusably slow and when even MATE is slow at displaying the Application Menu and very slow drawing icons, it is definitely a 14.10 distro issue--at least when using Haswell HD 5000.

So I guess I will stick with LTS for mythbuntu from now on. If only the XFCE devs would fix the xfsettingsd 'TV to NULL' bug, it will be perfect.

[Calinou]

So much for "Linux is ready for the desktop".

As if other operating systems were bug-free.

[Guest]

As if other operating systems were bug-free.

I'm not a fan of promoting Windows; but at least there I can run my 7850 without the entire OS locking up randomly.

In any case, there's still fglrx. Won't have my 7850 back till Wednesday, but I'll try it out with open-source drivers just to make sure the instability still persists. If it does, I'll just go to 14.04, install Catalyst 14.9, and be good to go (hopefully anyway; hoping the issue with Chrome maximizing and shifting to the right a bit was fixed). That's the good part about having two different drivers present, and on that note, I hope fglrx doesn't go away in the foreseeable future.