I am trying out Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha, the installation and first boot both went very well indeed. Since I already had a custom installation of GNU Grub 2.00, I loaded the installer on the Live CD with this command: ubiquity –no-bootloader and that enabled me to install Ubuntu without installing the Grub boot-loader, then I had to boot Linux Mint and type sudo update-grub to add Ubuntu to the boot menu. The only real problem I have is that I tried to install the ubuntu-restricted-extras and the installer was stuck on downloading the flashplugin tarball. I will be able to fix this if I run sudo apt-get update surely. I have changed my repositories from Australia to Germany, this should fix this problem. The download speed for that particular file is very slow, but that is the only thing that is actually problematic right now. The MyUnity application will not work, it says that the 12.10 distribution is not supported, and the VLC media player still does not support selecting the input when using V4L input, you can only view the #0 input and not number 1 or 2. But for watching video using a capture card input, you can use mplayer. The mplayer -tv input=1 tv:// command will display the video anyway, but VLC allows you to record video from the input in good quality. The me-tv software for Ubuntu 12.10 works though, you can tune in your Digital Television channels and it works just fine. The ability of me-tv to set scheduled recordings is impressive.
I managed to fix the problem with the flashplugin-installer, I typed sudo dpkg –configure -a to try and install the package again, then I hit Ctrl-C to abort the installation and typed: sudo apt-get purge flashplugin-installer to remove the package from the line-up of downloaded packages. Now the installation of the other packages has completed successfully and I may now move onto other things. For an Alpha release, the 12.10 distribution is actually not that bad at all, I have noticed that when you mount your other partitions by clicking on them in the nautilus file-manager that they are mounted under the /run/media/USERNAME folder. The example below shows what this looks like. The mounted partitions are separated according to the user that mounted them. This could be useful if a machine has multiple users.
flynn@deusexmachina:~$ ls -hula /run/media/flynn/ total 59K drwxr-x---+ 9 root root 180 Jul 1 19:07 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 60 Jul 1 19:07 .. drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:05 3fabc97d-c76a-4922-8705-5536e89cfd21 dr-xr-xr-x. 6 flynn root 4.0K Jul 1 19:05 52d826a6-7de5-45db-b693-dd7c7e82af37 drwxr-xr-x. 7 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:05 a6f66737-afea-48c3-9694-f6da22904d37 drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:05 c84b3630-79a5-4ab3-85a5-f50bc23a3da9 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 1.0K Jul 1 19:05 e01436e0-4aa5-420b-94aa-0b35bd00020e drwx------ 1 flynn flynn 40K Jun 24 10:24 Elements dr-xr-xr-x 1 flynn flynn 2.0K Jun 26 23:03 Ubuntu 12.10 amd64 |
The Gnome Shell desktop you can install for 12.10 is very good, but none of the extensions available work with the 3.5.3 version supplied with Ubuntu. Install Gnome Shell by typing sudo apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-panel and the Gnome desktop will be available. After installing this, the Lightdm login manager would not work properly for some reason, so I changed to the GDM login manager by typing sudo apt-get install gdm and selecting it as the default login manager. Other than a couple of bugs, the 12.10 Alpha release is actually quite usable, the Unity desktop works quite well, but the Gnome Shell desktop is even better. As you can see in the listing below, the Ubuntu distribution has not moved all the folders in / under the /usr folder as the Fedora distribution is, but I am sure they will do this in time.
flynn@deusexmachina:~$ ls -hula / total 56K drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:05 . drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:05 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:22 bin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Jun 30 19:02 boot drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jun 30 19:02 cdrom drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 4.8K Jul 1 22:14 dev drwxr-xr-x 139 root root 8.0K Jul 1 19:03 etc drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 31 Jul 1 19:05 home lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Jul 1 19:05 initrd.img -> boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-1-generic lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Jul 1 19:05 initrd.img.old -> /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-1-generic drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4.0K Jul 1 19:03 lib drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 33 Jul 1 19:06 lib64 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jul 1 19:06 media drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jul 1 19:06 mnt drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jul 1 19:06 opt dr-xr-xr-x 180 root root 0 Jul 1 16:12 proc drwx------ 6 root root 108 Jun 26 17:46 root drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 920 Jul 1 19:06 run drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8.0K Jul 1 19:22 sbin drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jul 1 19:06 selinux drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 6 Jun 30 19:02 srv dr-xr-xr-x 13 root root 0 Jul 1 16:13 sys drwxrwxrwt 13 root root 4.0K Jul 1 16:13 tmp drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 97 Jul 1 21:43 usr drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4.0K Jun 30 19:02 var lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Jul 1 19:05 vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-1-generic |