Breezy observations
I’ve set up Breezy multiple times and used it for quite some period. It’s now time to write some observations, focusing on changes from Hoary and things that matters most to me.
- Breezy now has a nice splash screen on boot up. However if things went unideal (for example when it takes too long to synchronize the clock to a time server) it will fallback to the console mode. Other than that fallback mode, the user will still see the console on grub, between grub and the startup splash, between the startup splash and gdm (a blinking console cursor), resuming hibernation, and when shutting down. I’m hoping Dapper will get rid of the console on bootup and shutdown sequence. It’s just plain ugly!
- OOo 2 is included, but sadly not the final version (it’s 1.9.129). I haven’t managed to successfully install version 2 final.
- Mono and its popular apps (Tomboy, F-spot, Banshee) is now on the main repositories!
- More game sounds work out of the box. In Hoary, after installing games many of them cannot output sound without further tweaking. Now the only game (among others that I tried) that still cannot output sound out of the box is Wesnoth.
- The option to open terminal when we right click the desktop is now gone. They (Gnome? Ubuntu?) probably removed it because opening a terminal has nothing to do with the desktop. Makes sense. If you’re a power user that need it regulary, just right click “Terminal” in “Applications” -> “Accessories” and choose “Add this launcher to panel”.
- “Run application” is gone from the “Applications” menu. I was shown a thread in Bugzilla discussing it. The Gnome devs decided to trash it because it’s mainly for power users (and they press ALT+F2 anyway, making the menu item pointless) and because it gives the impression to “average Joe” that running special commands is critical for normal usage.
- Browsing mode (instead of spatial) is now the default. I don’t know whether this is a Gnome or Ubuntu decision. Too bad because I was just trying to get used to it. Anyway you can go back to spatial by turning off “always_use_browser” from /apps/nautilus/preferences (run gconf-editor).
- I got Japanese input working using uim (see the wiki), however it crashes gnome apps occasionally :(.
That’s all for now…
PS: The one about Ubuntu kernel panic on my previous post, it turns out to be a hardware error. If I use another available memory slot Ubuntu boots just fine.
