Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Alpha 3: State of Unity Review

A while back I gave a pretty harsh review of Ubuntu Natty Alpha 1, to the point where I basically ran back screaming to Maverick Meerkat. Well, as I promised in the comments, I've given it another shot with the latest alpha release. The short review is this: Unity has progressed nicely, but still needs some polishing work, and be prepared for quite a few desktop workflow changes.

Unity: Almost there

Unity desktop on Alpha 3

Unity has definitely come a long way since Alpha 1 tortured me to death, but it still isn't quite polished enough for me to use as a decent desktop. But still, there's a lot improvements worth talking about. First, all the desktop launchers I had on my ~/Desktop directory no longer clutter up Unity's sidebar, although it's not immediately apparent how I can go about adding a launcher to it if I want to. When you launch an application like Firefox, you'll notice something quite jarring at first but makes sense given Canonical's recent design changes: the application menus are no longer shown in the application window(with a few exceptions), but rather on the top of the screen, like how it is on Mac OS X. After messing around with applications a bit, I quickly got used to it and don't consider it a bad change.

One other little improvement is that the sidebar hides itself whenever an active application window goes fullscreen or is moved over to left side of the screen.

There's one significant change that solves one of the major problems I had with Unity, but has it's own problems. When you click the Ubuntu logo on the top left of the screen, a big fat slab window appears with a search bar and some other stuff. While some folks may like it, I prefer it show menus similar to what you get when you click the Ubuntu logo in Gnome. I don't want to go around type-hunting for an application. Actually, this is pretty much the major thing keeping me from considering Unity as an actual desktop.

Gnome: Where "Classic" doesn't mean suckage

The "Classic" desktop: Gnome

 Canonical's worked so much on making Unity so compatible with Gnome, that Gnome actually feels like Unity(just without the sidebar or search slab window). It's still the same old Gnome, which isn't bad at all. The only major change you'll notice is in the default applications. Rhythmbox is gone, having been replaced by Banshee. While Banshee is a Mono application(I view Mono as pretty much a "necessary evil" as I need it for OpenSim), Banshee does its' job pretty good, and earns a spot as a worthy application for me. Firefox has been updated to a 4.0 beta release, bringing a few UI changes and Sync feature allowing remote preference, bookmark and settings backup and restore. OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice.

All in all, Alpha 3 has shown major improvements to the point where I have decided to keep it on my desktop machine. If you decide to install it, I have one protip for you: install it without choosing to download updates or proprietary packages during install. The installer bombed out when I tried that, and had to redo the installation. Hopefully that will be fixed in the next alpha. Nevertheless, good job, Canonical!

Doing everyday tasks on a Linux CLI environment

In my last post, I detailed the horrific digital aftermath of what happened after I had tested out the Ubuntu Natty Alpha 1 release. In short, I was left with a system that refused to boot into a graphical environment at all and was forced to use the command line to do several tasks that would normally be done in a GUI. I was so surprised at how remarkably easy it was to do these tasks(web browsing, torrent downloading, CD burning) on the command line, I announced my intention of going completely GUI-less for two days.

While the "recovery console" session option found in the GDM login screen would be the closest replication of my X-less ordeal, I found that the xterm window it had was too small to show in snapshots. I decided to log into Gnome, but work solely within a maximized xterm window(alternatively you can use gnome-terminal and toggle full-screen with the F11 button). Here are the following applications I've used so far, grouped together according to general tasks:

File Management:

Midnight Commander

There's a few options when it comes to file management on the console. There are, of course, the built-in shell commands(cd, ls, touch, mkdir, rm,rmdir, etc.) ready to be used with just a few keystrokes. But if you want to navigate your filesystem in a more visual way, you can either use the built-in file navigator in the vim text editor(type ":e ." at the vim command line to activate it), or use the Midnight Commander(mc) file manager to do so. Midnight Commander is a two-paned file manager, allowing you to perform file management tasks in two places at once. It can perform file (de)compression, and includes its' own command line when you need to do precise actions on a selection.

Window Management:

Yes, the Linux command line can have a "window manager" of sorts. That window manager is called screen. It allows you to have multiple terminal sessions, similar to managing tabs in GUI terminal emulators. It's a necessity when you want to run several command line tasks at once and backgrounding will not suffice, or when have logged onto a server via SSH and wish to run something after you've exited the session. It should be available in virtually any major distribution's repositories.

Multimedia:

While it's true the command line is non-graphical, it is certainly possible to do some multimedia tasks with no problems.

For sound recording, you can use arecord to record sound from your microphone, and then pipe the output to an encoder like so:

arecord -f cd -d numberofseconds -t raw | lame -x -r – out.mp3

arecord -f cd -d numberofseconds -t raw | oggenc – -r -o out.ogg

Music On Console

For listening to audio stored on your computer, there's several console-based music players(such as gst123, aplay and the awesome opencubicplayer), but I like Music-On-Console(moc), as it allows you to play music in the background while doing other tasks. It is invoked as "mocp" on the command line(to avoid clashing with the "meta object compiler" used when compiling Qt/KDE graphical applications). While playing music, press "q" to exit back to the command line, but all the music in mocp's current directory or playlist will continue to play. You can simply re-invoke mocp to get control again.

To rip audio from a CD, cdparanoia does the job well and the output can be sent to an audio encoder just like arecord.

You can also master and burn CDs/DVDs on the command line. As I mentioned in the last blog post, growisofs can be used to both create ISO images and burn them to disc.

You can also watch movies on the command line with mplayer by invoking it like this:

mplayer -vo caca movie.avi


Office:

Vim, editing a C header file

Yup, you can do some standard office tasks on the command line. For doing calculations, there's the bc command line calculator. And there's no dearth of command line text editors(nano, vim, emacs, etc.), but there's only two apps specifically geared towards word processing: antiword and wordgrinder.

Antiword allows you to view and convert MS Word files into plain text, PostScript or PDF files. An indispensable tool if working with Word files is unavoidable.

Wordgrinder word processor

Wordgrinder is perhaps the only thing on Linux that can be called a console-based word processor. While it writes in its' own native format, it can import from and export to plain text and HTML files. It supports basic styles and paragraphs, but don't expect anything fancy. Nevertheless, its' better than plain text or forcing yourself to do TeX formatting.

SC spreadsheet calculator

For spreadsheet processing, sc fits the bill perfectly(especially if you like vi/vim). Combined with wordgrinder and abook(console address book), you pretty much have a console office suite at this point.

Internet:

While Web browsing has evolved into a very multimedia affair(Flash, Youtube, Facebook/Twitter, etc.), there's a surprising amount of things you can do on the Internet without a GUI.

ELinks web browser, viewing Groklaw.net

For console web browsing, Ubuntu ships w3m by default. While w3m is okay for viewing individual pages, that's all it's really good for. It's basically like the "less" command for web pages. For a truly decent console web browser, elinks is the way to go. It has bookmarks, download management, color support, CSS support and yet it cuts through all the useless crap(Flash, ads and popups) to get you the content you really want.

For non-interactive web interaction, wget and curl are excellent tools. You can also download torrents with the rtorrent console client(mentioned in the previous blog post and highly recommended).

For email, there's several console email clients to use. There's pine/alpine, the traditional mail command, and mutt. If you're used to using the nano text editor, alpine is the easiest option. Mutt is way more powerful, but requires a bit of configuration to get it working specifically how you want it to.

Irssi, chatting with the Kokua/Imprudence devs

For instant messaging, you can use Finch, the console version of the Pidgin instant messenger. And I've found irssi to be a very capable console IRC chat application.

Google:

GoogleCL manpage

Yes, believe it or not, Google has a command line interface for some of its' services(Blogger, Youtube, Picasa, Docs, etc.). And because of that, it gets it's own section. On Ubuntu, you can install the "googlecl" package directly via apt-get. If your distribution's package manager doesn't have it available, you could download the tarball and compile it yourself.

Graphics:

Montage of previous screenshots

You would think that in a command-line only environment, there's not much you can do with graphics. But strangely enough, that's not the case with the ImageMagick suite of command line tools. With ImageMagick, you could create and manipulate pictures in ways that was once the sole domain of GUI image editors like GIMP. The above picture is a montage of all the other pictures I took while creating this blog post, made possible by the montage tool of the ImageMagick suite. You can make composites, animated GIFs, apply various effects, and a whole lot of other things.

Gaming:

Yes, there's some terminal-based gaming options for Linux. You can connect to various text-based MUD(multi-user dungeon) games on the Internet via the telnet command. A good place to start with MUD games is The Mud Connector. If text-only isn't your thing and require something marginally more graphical, the surprisingly challenging nethack game may be right up your alley. If you've got a bunch of old DOS games lying around, you can use dosbox to play them.

Missed stuff:

I'm pretty sure I've missed a few things, so feel free to let me know in the comments.

Ubuntu Unity Desktop Review: The disasterous aftermath

Yesterday, I blogged about the current shortcomings of the Unity desktop environment. What happened afterwards, however, is a horror story with a valuable lesson learned, and also something of a testament as to why the *nix command-line still rocks hard.

The problem started when I noticed that Totem and MPlayer started acting weird. When playing a video, the colors were screwed up. But it was kinda funny how people in videos looked as blue as the Smurfs(I now regret not taking a screenshot when I had the chance). So I thought "Maybe I'll check the repositories to see if there's any updates that could fix this".

So I fired up update-manager, and sure enough there were a lot of updates. I proceeded to install them all, thinking it would fix the movie problems and maybe pull in some improvements to Unity too. After the slightly lengthy download and install process, I was instructed to reboot the machine.

On reboot, instead of seeing the familiar GDM login screen, I get greeted with a black screen with only a "ubuntu login:" text prompt. Apparently the X server failed to start up properly. So I logged in and tried to start it manually with "startx". No dice, and it mentioned something about the Nvidia modules. It was then I knew what had happened: the kernel image and/or the nvidia modules didn't jive together. I then tried installing the nvidia-current package and then rebooted. Still didn't work. So I was left with one option: back up my data and re-install the stable Ubuntu release.

But I didn't have a CD/DVD with Ubuntu already on it. I had to first go to the Ubuntu website, download the ISO, and then burn it to disc all from the command-line.

Luckily, I still had access to the Web, could install packages via apt-get, and I knew my way around getting help in a gui-less situation. First, I installed elinks(a text-mode web browser) and rtorrent(a command-line bittorrent client). I launched elinks and navigated to the torrent download link. I saved the torrent file to my home directory, then launched rtorrent to quickly download the ISO.

The real tricky part for me was figuring out how to burn the ISO image via the command-line. After doing a little Googling, I found that the command "growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=image.iso" fit the job perfectly. After the disc burn was complete, I rebooted and the live session started up without a hitch.

During the live session, I attempted to copy as much of my user data onto a pen drive as I could. Unfortunately, many of the files were somehow uncopiable(undoubtedly a permissions glitch). But whatever I couldn't backup wasn't anything irreplaceable, so it wasn't all too bad.

Then I launched the Ubuntu installer. The installer pretty much took me by surprise, as I recalled I never actually installed Maverick Meerkat fresh before(previously I had upgraded to it from the previous release, Lucid Lynx). The installer is now so polished I can confidently say it's idiot-proof.

Once the install was done, I rebooted and was greeted with an uber-fast bootup from manufacturer splash image to GDM in less than 15 seconds. I'm now still in the process of rebuilding all my lost user data, but I'm back in the game with a couple of golden nuggets of wisdom:

1. Always regularly backup your stuff, because shit really does happen when you least expect it.
2. When you're using early alpha software, shit happening is almost guaranteed. Be prepared for it.

However, this experience has compelled me to try a little experiment in the near future. I plan to dedicate at least 2 days of computer use solely within a command-line environment. No desktop environments, no window managers, and no GUI applications at all. Of course this means no SL or YouTube, but I'd like to see how far the command-line can be used to perform tasks usually reserved for a GUI environment. Look out for a future blog post on it.

Ubuntu Unity Desktop Review

A few days ago I decided to upgrade my desktop Ubuntu OS from 10.10(Maverick Meerkat) to 11.04(Natty Narwal) Alpha 1. Previous experience upgrading to such an early alpha release told me that this would be very risky and likely I would have to re-install back to the stable release. But after the lengthy upgrade process was completed(took a few hours because I had Gnome, KDE, and LXDE desktop environments previously installed), I successfully rebooted and was greeted with the familiar GDM login screen.

I clicked on my username, entered my password and chose "Ubuntu Desktop Edition" for the desktop session. But instead of Gnome or Unity popping up, it appeared that what I got was a very unfinished and incomplete desktop session. There was no launcher, no panel or even an easy logout mechanism. I was ready to dismiss Alpha 1 as a starting point only for the developers. FAIL.

But it turned out the Unity launcher and panel was present, but required desktop effects to be turned on to use them. So I did just that and this is what appeared:

Ubuntu Unity "Desktop"

Looks like a cross between Gnome Shell and Ubuntu's Netbook UI. What initially annoyed me was that all the entries I created in my Desktop directory were being shown twice: in the launcher and on the desktop screen. And notice the launcher entries displaying a question mark as the icon? That's because it seems the launcher can't display icons that are not stored on the system icon directories. I'd have to hover my mouse over the icons to tell what they really are. FAIL.

But the worst current feature of this release is finding all the applications. You have to click on the Ubuntu logo on the top left of the screen, and Nautilus will appear showing you the /usr/share/applications directory. Ugh. No application menu grouping or sorting by task at all here, just a single directory being spit out in front of you. FAIL.

As far as I can see, the current incarnation of the Unity desktop isn't even a true desktop environment yet. It's still a major work-in-progress, much like when KDE 4 first appeared. No doubt we'll see much improvement in future alpha releases, but for now I'll be sticking with Gnome/KDE/LXDE for my real desktop needs. Unity still needs a lot of work to be easy enough for casual use.

Ubuntu Harshing on GIMP

I had recently heard that Canonical is going to remove GIMP from the default install of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS("Lucid Lynx"). At first, many people thought it was being removed for space reasons(you can only put so much onto a 700MB CD), but it was revealed that they are removing it and replacing it with F-Spot, a horrid photo management app. Seriously, are they kidding?

The reasoning behind the move, at least what they publicly say, is that they believe "average users" don't create/edit images or graphics, they do touchups on Aunt Selma's vacation photos. Also another reason for removal is that the UI for GIMP is too intimidating for new users. While I agree pretty much with the latter reason, I believe the former is really just a false pretense to prop up an ill-fitted Mono application over a more logical replacement for GIMP: gpaint.

I'm not alone in this sentiment, either. In a poll thread posted on the Ubuntu Forums, 58.89%(712 votes) believe removing GIMP is a big step backwards for Ubuntu compared to 41.11%(497 votes) think removal from the default install is a good thing.

So that means there's a ballpark 60% majority in favor of either keeping GIMP or at least have a better replacement app than F-Spot. Yet Canonical isn't listening to their users. I'm even convinced that when the GIMP finally gets that UI overhaul at the end of the year, Canonical won't even take one glimpse at it, because they are practically in love with F-Spot.

So how do we push back against this bogus Mono power play? It's pretty simple: On first boot to the desktop after installation, head straight for the Synaptic Package Manager, remove F-Spot and install GIMP or gpaint. Then go to "Software Sources" and check off "Submit statistical information", as it will report back that F-Spot has been immediately purged and replaced with GIMP or gpaint. If enough of these reports are made, then the developers will have no choice but to change the installation packages to reflect the preferences of the users.