Discussion on:

Ubuntu 11.04: Installation stumbling block and post-install impressions

... was to disable the Unity plugin in Compiz Settings. Blamo!

There are a couple of things that bother me:

- No auto hide for top panel. Folks at Canonical think it's not logical, but it is.

- No customization for top panel

- Worse still, no customization for dash. I use webmail, not email, keep no photos, and can well find my music player. I'd like stuff I often use in there

- Unity is just another Compiz plugin, which can be disabled like any other plugin, with ***cough cough*** interesting consequences. Are you kidding me? It also clashes with Compiz used from other desktops, like Gnome.

In all... the above annoyances aren't worth switching from LAMP to WAMP, nor to another Linux distro... I think.... for now. It depends on how fast and if Canonical is going to fix things. I hope it will, because IMHE it's about time to overcome the Gnome/KDE divide.

I tried to get on with the unity desktop, but after using it for 2 days, switched back to the standard (and less resource hungry) Gnome desktop. I'm having a few issues, such as occasional freezes, but apart from that, i'm enjoying 11.04

Isn't it past time that Ubuntu offer the option of Desktop (Unity, Gnome, KDE, etc.) at install.
As a Windows user, I have tried to shift to Linux, but the desktop is one area of concern. Programmes are written for KDE, Gnome, (and I presume will be written for Unity).
Why can't Ubuntu consolidate the options? Give us a system with greater option instead of Ubuntu, Kubuntu etc.?

Try Zorin Os 4. I'm sure you will like the three desktop options.

How about when logging on and starting a session? Especially on a multi-user machine.

You can select which desktop to use at login, there is a little box down on the bottom of the screen that you can click an arrow on. I believe I read something on the Ubuntu site about it, if you found you didn't like Unity.

I know you can, with certain DEs, choose among installed DEs. It was a suggestion; a rhetorical question.

I don't use Ubuntu.

if you get away from the ubuntu and respins and get to REAL distros.
with REAL security. [ none of this rootless sudo bull manure cannonical is promoting ]

most REAL distros include options and customizations of what is being installed. only the livecd based distros don't. [ more of them than just cannonical's garbage distros ]

but if you are used to the cannonical idiocies, then you wouldn't like a distro that required a dvd or 3 cds to install.
[ ohh debian 14 cds if you grab them all ]

most REAL distros you have a login screen option of up to 14 different guis to use.

move from the poorly designed and built cannonical products and into the real world of open source.

Loaded both of my PCs with 11.04; both machines after install a locked black screen appears if the PC is left idle for a couple of hours (it also locks up on the screensaver). Only fix now is to turn the PC off and boot up again. Other problem, unity desktop blacks out icons on menu (ubuntu one and dropbox so far). You only see what it is if you right click the mouse over it. Boot up times are also slower than other ubuntu versions. I imagine most of these minor problems will be fixed quickly. On the positive "Wine" seems to run better in this version. I could never get Voxox to work properly in older versions with Wine. So at first I didn't like the new desktop but I am warming up to it. Overall I think Ubuntu is going in the right direction. It is still a little buggy. I would recommend waiting a month or so before loading.

Was prompted for the upgrade from MM. Have been a keen Ubuntu user - and I still am but have decided to keep to the MM version. It took a while to upgrade, which was understandable due to the amount involved. It worked, and booted up OK. I was a bit lost and decided that I liked the old MM version a bit better.
Continued to go with the Natty Narwhale but a lot of things seemed to be missing. Then, the next day when I booted up, the screen display was all pretty and I could not do anything with it.

Still like ubuntu, but will keep on with MM, until the next decent version comes out.

Disappointed

KJR

I am very impressed with the new Unity Desktop. I did have a small problem installing when choosing which partition to install to, the selection menu appeared and disappeared very quickly. I tried it again and no worky. This happened a few times until I realized I had to select as if using an Apple OS and hold the rt button down and move to the desired partition. After that things went very smooth.

Had much the same experience as you from a Live CD.

Couldn't get Unity to work on one machine, but it did on the other.

In fairness, I haven't installed it, but after what I saw, I won't be going to.

Once I got to try it, I hated it.

This is Linux dumbed down - big time. If I wanted that, I may as well go back to Windows.

Sorry, it's not for me.

I won't be moving from Debian any time soon.

I have been running Ubuntu and Mint for years now. I do not race to install the first release. I think Ubuntu 10.04 underwent some changes to Ubuntu 10.04.1 or 10.04.2, I do not recall which I have here.

For the OS that will attract the new user it is Mint hands down, no fiddling with repos to get proprietary drivers, flash and Java, it just works out of the box!

Ubuntu for that reason will NEVER attract the casual users they seek which are new to linux, Mint WILL.

It is almost insane anyone thinks that new users want anything more to install and use it. They do not want a learning curve about repos, apt-get, and the perils of proprietary drivers in ubuntu.

Give them a Minty fresh version where it all works out of the box.

I have to agree with you on this. Mint simply works as stated. This unity is so disappointing...I will not be using it for sure.

From Windows to Mint with barely a complaint from my two very young daughters too!

I have several users that I switched from M$ something to Mint and not one of them is looking back. Just simply runs everything.

I've used Mint LXDE, XFCE and Gnome, but when I got a new HP laptop and tried the new Debian edition, wifi didn't work, sound didn't work, camera didn't work, function buttons didn......oh, good ole ubuntu 10.10 runs it all fine.

I haven't installed the released version of 11.04 even though I have downloaded it. I am waiting to see what others experience first. When I installed the beta of 11.04 from my MM, it destroyed the entire partition. MM never recovered and it took a couple of utilities to rebuild the partition. Fortunately, I used that partition for a test bed so no data was destroyed. Unfortunately, in the process of rebuilding the partition, it seemed to affect my Win7 install. I had to repair that before it would work again. I won't try an Ubuntu beta again without serious research into other user experiences. I am still not sure I will recommend any client upgrad to 11.04 until I am sure the install issues have been resolved.

I always install a new distro on a clean drive. A removable hard drive bay works
wonders.

I always install beta releases in virtual machines (using either VMWare Player or VirtualBox). That way, I always have a way to explore the new features, experience bugs and get a feel for the new release without risk of losing data or valuable work. I don't even have to purchase a removable drive. And when the final release comes out, I already have an idea as to whether I'll want to upgrade, or wait until the next LTS release.

Its possibly going the wrong way with Unity despite its affinity to netbooks etc and in all probability Ubuntu 10.04 remains the most well rounded release, but developers by nature have got to have new stuff to work on !
Its almost as easy to build up your own from a Debian minimal install cd check out my blog on it here:- http://terminator3000debian.blogspot.com/ you can add your own choice of modules/packages including Gnome and many others (though I prefer Fluxbox, its much faster) from both Debian and Ubuntu repositories. Really, if you can follow instructions on an install cd its a no-brainer to build your own and you should check out the link.The Ubuntu releases by and large are for strictly non-technical users and as such are completely valid and very useful for many. Canonical should clearly take a lot of credit for bringing linux to mainstream attention. However, as long as you understand just the basics it is a simple matter to build your own using the Debian stable release, you then have access to thousands of modules from Debian and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu also have a minimal install cd but I found the Debian one here http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ just that much faster and more stable.
Try it and follow my blog http://terminator3000debian.blogspot.com/ - you wont look back.

I just installed 11.04 today from scratch, posting this from it now. I had a few issues, the biggest was that I couldn't get unity to run, it kept loading into gnome. After much digging I found a forum post where an Ubuntu developer explained that they were blacklisting most nvidia graphics cards as the drivers have the potential to ruin a users experience and then provided the workaround. Which was simply adding UNITY_FORCE_START=1 to /etc/environment. It is working great on my laptop now, but I am inclined to agree with the author, if an average user, and a massive amount of users have nvidia cards, tries to install/update this version they are in for a whirl wind forum ride to get everything working. And why would ubuntu even think blacklisting the most popular add-in graphics card was a good idea??? Even if the drivers were bad on certain cards I would prefer to give a few nvidia users a bad experience instead all nvidia users no experience at all. Just my .02

Install went without a hickup using Ubuntu 10.10 DVD direct use and then downloading the new version and installing it over XP Raid partition formatting that partition fully ro ext4.
The new Unity is so strange that I'm thinking of burning a Kubuntu 11.04 install DVD and try it, but now back to work with WinDOS-7U64

Installed on my laptop just fine, but on my desktop, when I restarted, the monitor was out of range until the log in screen came up. My screen is 1366 X 768 at 60hz. Ubuntu11.04 doesn't support that resolution. MY desktop is motherboard is a Nvidia 6150SE nforce 430. It ran 10.10 just great. I installed Linuxmint 10 on a spare partition while I decide what to do.

I installed Natty this morning on a P4 with 2.5 Gig RAM. I chose the option to install with my Lucid. I also had a bit of confusion partitioning the single drive on the computer. I also had a bit of trouble with the testing option, the install worked. I had used the betas on Virtual Box but it would not allow the use of Unity.

I had a few hitches getting Nattty installed, including the TEST opting, I stuck with it. But, I do understand why others do not feel it is worth their spending too much time on a version that does not "Feel Right". I have rejected many distros because some little thing just seemed like too much trouble to fix. Then, I have tried some that worked on one of my computers but not on the other. The nice thing about Linux is that somewhere in the 300+ listing on Distrowatch, you will find one or six that does what you want to do. For me, Ubuntu 10.04.2 and Windows 7 works for me. And, I keep one hard drive if I hear about something I want to try. I find that I keep coming back to Lucid and most likely will until the next LTS comes out.

Right. Almost forget: Good or back, at least the desktop is no longer boring. I'll keep it on at least a week to get the hang of Natty. Or not.

Paul

A while back I tried to install Ubuntu and almost had a heart attack. Here is what happened.

I have Boot-It-NG boot manager installed on my machine and ALWAYS do clean installation on a freshly formatted primary partition. So far as any version of the MS Windows or some of the Linux versions like Slackware, Mandriva or Puppy, are concerned I have the option of installing the boot sector files to the root of the concerned partition, I still prefer Lilo over Grub. All I have to do than is to simply boot from my Boot-IT-NG cd and reactivate it. Not so in Ubuntu. It took over the entire hard disk - without any warning and trashed all the rest of my bootable partitions. Fortunately Boot-It-Ng was able to recover all the partitions and I could revert to the previous setup. Ever since than I have never made any attempt at Ubuntu installation.

Despite liking a lot of shiny effects in newer desktop environments, et al, I would love to go back to KDE3.3 if they would still maintain it.

My HP Pavilion dv4 had no problem at all with the "Try it First" mode. The Third Party driver for the Broadcom BCM wireless adapter even worked great, once it was installed. The Unity desktop is a real pleasure to work with. I am thrilled to see Ubuntu with it's own look and feel. The machine I'm using now is a very old Dell Inspiron 3700 with 432M of RAM and a Pentium III processor. Of course I can't use Unity on this machine but the Gnome desktop works great. I have used Ubuntu nearly exclusively since Kubuntu 6.04.

Luckily I have a test box I use. First tried the UPGRADE option from update manager and it killed the systems stone dead, no 10.10 no 11.04.

Downloaded the .iso and installed clean, it sort of works, but with my nVidia card no Unity and for some reason no networking, though it says it is working it is either very very slow or non existant. Picked up an IP when booted but then refuses to ping or be pinged across my network.

Once I get networking going properly will look for nVidia drivers (I assume Ubuntu clean install has reverted me to the open source ones), then force Unity to run (the machine should have enough grunt despite what the install says)

Then I'll stick with this on TEST until Canonical sort the problems out.

Luckily I have a test box I use. First tried the UPGRADE option from update manager and it killed the system stone dead, no 10.10 no 11.04. Goodness knows what I would have done if a single PC and no backup, which is probably the majority of users.

Downloaded the .iso and installed clean, it sort of works, but with my nVidia card no Unity and for some reason no networking, though it says it is working it is either very very slow or non existant. Picked up an IP when booted but then refuses to ping or be pinged across my network.

Once I get networking going properly will look for nVidia drivers (I assume Ubuntu clean install has reverted me to the open source ones), then force Unity to run (the machine should have enough grunt despite what the install says)

Then I'll stick with this on TEST until Canonical sort the problems out.

i tried the kubuntu 11.04 update within the kubuntu distro but it failed some package missing alert popped up and it abandoned the install.

Thank you mr Wallen for your insight, if I may suggest an improvement on your writing when you refer to a topic stick to it, in the "Post Install" part of your article you end the first paragraph with "But if these installation issues arent ironed out, Ubuntu is going to find itself losing ground.", I believe you had already covered the installation issues and the Post Install section was to address the things to come after you installed it.

To me, the main drawback (and the reason why Im using Classic) is lack of customization in Unity, googled for a while and could not find a way to
1. Always show the side bar
2. Move the side bar to the bottom

Additionally, I dislike not having menus to see what problems do I have installed (agreed, not every installed program shows under Applications, but the ones I manually install I add to that menu).

I guess its all a matter of taste, Unity is not my meat loaf.

Upgrade for me when completely flawless so I am happy with that part of the process (MoBo: ATI Formula IV, Video: Sapphire Radeon HD 6970, AMD 1100T).

I did not have that problem installing, but I hate Unity; (yes, I'm one of them.)
Luckilly we can fall back to "Ubuntu Classic", because that's what I want; that's what works best for me.

(I also have ClassicShell on Windows 7.)

What I did come across, but this was with the latest openSUSE is that non of the GNOME versions would really boot on this machine. Booting ended up on a pink background with grey stripes.

I should report this as a (serious) bug.

Ubuntu 11.04 (Classic-Ubuntu), well, on the outside there is really not that much deference since Lucid (which I still use), except for the "LibreOffice" being there (which I like)

But if you want a conclussion: Unity-desktop is not for me. Completely not for me. If it would have been the only desktop, I would switch to any other distro using GNOME (probably Mandriva or the new Mageia) without hesitation.
Ubuntu made its choice.
The users shall make theirs as well.

BTW: I'm a support point for Heist-op-den-Berg, Belgium.
I already received an e-mail from an unsatisfied user of the Unity desktop.
I can only join him.

I did the upgrade through the pop-up only to have Narwhal freeze everytime I get to the user log-in screen...unfortunately I have not been able to find a single thing as to what's causing that as my hardware should be able to support it with no issue. And I don't believe I'm running a nVidia chipset either...

I spent hours upgrading from 10.10 and witnessed instant disappointment. The Desktop is rubbish compared to 10.10 which is Gnome, I believe. It was a simple thing, even for me, to place apps in the top toolbar in 10.10. I had gmail, Google Docs and the Calendar all perched there. Now 11.04 just makes another copy of the running program. I'm afraid it will be back to 10.10 unless I can get the Gnome Desktop running. I read somewhere that the next version of Mint should replace UBUNTU, which I have faithfully tried to get to work. No threat to Microsoft; I think!

As I'm not fond of change, I forced myself to try the 11.04 Beta for one week to give it a fair trial, And hated it. Unity is terrible. The Ubuntu classic 11.04 also seems slow and glitchy, I've gone back to 10.10.

Crashed during post-installation configuration. Had to reboot and recover with old kernel, and complete configuration with recover menu, then update grub with recover menu. OK after reboot. Graphics is Nvidia FX5200, with incidentally does not work properly with nouveau driver under meerkat - not had a chance to see if ok on narwhal yet.

I have installed Ubuntu 11.04 on two machines both times using the wubi option. This installs Ubuntu inside windows and makes it easier to remove it after. Wubi downloaded and installed Ubuntu without any problems. On my AMD machine with an AMD Video card, Unity installed straight away, although I did have to instlall drivers post installation for the card to work at it's full potential. On an older Intel based machine with a NVIDIA video card, at first boot i was meet with a message that Unity could not be initiated, but after a quick and easy installation of the nvida drivers and a reboot, Unity was up and running. I will be keeping it installed and I am impressed with the improvements of version 11.04.

I always get a huge chuckle when uber-geeks cannot get something to work, while a rank amateur such as I have no problem doing the same thing. I have three machines, and I had no problem running the live version of Ubuntu 11.04 or doing a complete install. You make it sound as though the software is nigh-impossible for the average user to install. Not true and not fair.

I was surprised, though, at how long is took to upgrade from 10.10 on yet another machine, but maybe that was just a function of the number of programs I had installed under the previous version.

I just upgraded a Acer One D255E netbook, and the upgrade was flawless (better than 10.04 to 10.10), and pretty quick (probably because I was up to date with packages on 10.10). This is the first machine I have done and need to do a bit more testing before I do other machines.

Didn't like Unity and switched back to Ubuntu Classic quite quickly. Why? I use Ubuntu as a real OS and not as a tablet. If I want a tablet, I will use Andriod. Nothing wrong with Andriod; does everything I want on the go, and perfect for browsing web pages. But Ubuntu gives me a full Linux OS and thus I want a full functioning desktop.

Upgrade was a doodle. You guys how no idea how difficult Linux and UNIX was 20 years ago. Everything is so easy now.

A little rough around the edges, a couple of annoyances here and there, but the general concept is fundamentally sound. I managed to get it into more or less satisfactory workable condition, with Compiz sphere, and all the fancy stuff up & running.

My gut feeling about the whole thing is OK. Having been in this business for more 25 years, it seldomly lies to me. It's quite possible, though, that Canonical bite off more then it can chew here. Starting a whole new desktop, aimed to replace Gnome & KDE is quite a feat, and the outcome is pretty much uncertain.

My plan is to use Unity until autmn release of 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot to see where the whole thing is headed. If Canonical manages to fix the biggest annoyances (above all, lack of customization), I'll stick with it. If not, I'll probably switch to Mint or Debian.

Rank failure! Got to the desktop background image and there it stuck fast never to go again! have been using Ubuntu for many years as my main OS, and this is the first time I have ever had a problem.

I think it is something to do with NVIDIA graphics.

This is exactly what Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular do NOT need. It only reinforces the view that Linux is hard to use and only for Geeks - something I disagreed with until now!

This needs fixing and fast - it has put me off, and will undoubtedly put offlots of other folk as well.

Just as well I tried it out on a "second" machine"

My main machine runs 10.04 LTS and luckily I have a spare machine for mucking around and I decided to do a clean install from USB. It went flawlessly as all previous installations, but the experience afterwards was extremely disappointing. The interface makes everthing clumsy and it takes more clicks and operations to try and do things compared to 10.04. I normally use six virtual desktops as I work on lots of things at the same time and I could not do this with Unity. It's just more dumbed down and stupid as windoze. No thanks, I will stick with a Gnome desktop that I can customise to my hearts desire in a way that works for me. I hope the developers will revocer their sanity and either make something usefull of this controversy or put this release in the trash can.

After upgrading my ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 through the package manager (I didnt face Jack's Problems due to this.) I was faced with the unity interface. I tried sometime to find what i wanted and it took more time than gnome to get at my daily software and files etc. I think once you get used to Unity it can be really productive. but the learning curve is too much when moving from Gnome to Unity. so reverted back to gnome interface. will try to give Unity a try again soon. but hoping to see Gnome 3 released with ubuntu 11.11

Installed Wine 1.3 and Quicken 2009. Works but the mouse cursor is misaligned! It points 1/2 inch lower than the click itself so if you point to a registry entry and click, you get the entry above the one you desire. Big problem. I tried this on two different systems, same thing! Help!

My installation went smoothly.
I upgraded this morning and haven???t fully tested the OS yet.
The only weird things I saw this morning are when rebooting, the screen seen seems to have difficulties configuring itself.
It gives repeatedly during the rebooting a screen with the Ubuntu color stripes and black stripes, lengthwise from the top to the bottom.
I have a multy boot configuration, this was B/W in the past, but fitted the screen.
Now it has the nice Ubuntu color feature, but it doesn???t fits the screen anymore. Part of the text is lost at the left.
Once the booting is finished this is solved again.
The multy boot works fine as before ( Ubuntu, OpenSuSe, MS Windows 7 and its multy boot menu for Vista as well XP )

I now have Kubuntu up and running but it took 2 days. I could not get logged in due Nvidia drivers did not load. I used live cd to wipe out xconfig file and was able to log in and install new Nvidia drivers and the unit is working fine. But with out command line knowledge and other users posting I might have done a new install.

I love the new look of the desktop. I am encountering several bugs such as; lock ups, boot-up locks and fails, hibernate throws out an error and reboots, if I switch my wireless switch off and back on it doesn't turn back on, update manager doesnt report accurate updates, applications button on unity bar will show nothing, adding buttons to untiy bar some icons will end up blacked out. I'm sure that some of these issues are hardware related however I was not having all of these errors with maverick. Hoping patches are coming soon!

I am a die hard Linux user, but I have to say that Ubuntu 11.04 was not ready! It has far, far, far too many bugs! After upgrading to 11.04, I got a blank screen and no way to access anything. I re-created a menu from scratch. I then found it hard to resize anything and the scroll bar was hard to use. After two days I lost my Grub!

This version is going to hurt the growth of Linux and help Microsoft. That we do not need!!!

Mark Heinemann

Installed on my home machine which uses ATI Radeon so next I installed it on my office machine at work which uses Nvidia. Big mistake. Install went ok but upon reboot: no GUI. Just the command line when I go to Alt 6. I have not yet done the post mortem.

Used Unity for a few days on the home machine then said meh! and went back to gnome. Switching between apps using the dock was an irritant. Prefer the bar at the bottom of the page.

I did the upgrade from 10.10 to the 11.04 Beta. Instantly my Broadcom wireless stopped working (Dell Laptop). Now everytime I reboot my computer I have to use 'sudo modprobe b43' in terminal to bring up my wireless, the third party STA drivers do not work like they did perfectly in 10.10.

Had this been resolved?? If I do a fresh install of 11.04 will my wireless work after installing the STA drivers using a lan cable???

Seriously considering switching to another distro after this screw up. There have been countless posts online of other users with the same issues.

I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 through the update manager. Actually 11.04 was available that way 2 days before the official release. The upgrade installed flawlessly and everything worked without a glitch.
Tried the install on an older machine with very restricted hardware. Ubuntu 11.04 seemed to sit forever on that initial screen. I thought it had frozen but decided to leave it on its own. Went to eat dinner and by the time I finished I already had a screen waiting for my input. The installed finished and informed me that I don't have enough hardware to run unity so Ubuntu will run in standard mode, which made the desktop look like 10.04 but the reported version was still 11.04 and everything worked just fine.

I was running 10.10 with wubi and decided to make my laptop exclusively a Linux computer. I formatted my hard drive and then installed 11.04. Unity did not work when it first installed, but that was because of my Nvidia driver needed to be activated. Once I activated it it worked fine. I've played around with it for a few days and am still getting used to it. My only problem is that I can't seem to get my Samsung printer to print properly anymore.

I think I will wait for 11.10 I didn't install m$ products until after SP1 and I think I will wait till October for Unity.

This turned out to be a nightmare for me. I had 10.10 and I tried to upgrade to 11.04, I ended up with a blank/black screen. I tried to re-boot hoping it would work. Nothing happened, each time the screen said it would boot all I saw was a black screen. I just copied all the files to an external drive and installed Fedora. Thanks to Knoppix and unebootin, I was able to boot from the USB drive and install Fedora there. I got figure out how to make Ubuntu work in the external drive without destroying my files. I guess I was greedy, should have stayed with Ubuntu 10.10.

I was also running ubuntu 10.10 on my laptop, when I went to upgrade I had many errors and some programs wouldn't run so since the laptop is my play around computer I just formatted the drive and installed 11.04 fresh. I still had some errors that came up on startup but after running update manager everything was fixed and I have had no problems since. I also decided to install the GNOME 3 desktop instead of unity which I like a lot better. Overall I'm very pleased with Ubuntu 11.04 with the GNOME 3 desktop and am going to continue using it.

I never believed Ubuntu would be a disappointment and, until 11.04, it wasn't. Last week I replaced the hard drive in my laptop. Although I'd been happily running Ubuntu 10.04, in the spirit of progress, I decided to install 11.04 on it. I had to repeat that process 3 times and each time I experienced the same problems.

First of all, the time and date services didn't work. I installed NTP and tried to set it up. Although I was able to verify the time servers were working, the service refused to get the time from any of them. Each time a message appeared telling me either the firewall (which was disabled) was the problem or the time servers were not available. Then, on a subsequent re-installation, I decided to forgo NTP and just set the time manually. The Time & Date Settings wouldn't run. As it turns out, that's a documented bug.

Then I set the screen saver to Random after 15 minutes and Power Management to turn the screen off after one hour. I waited well over an hour and the screen stayed on and the screensaver didn't run. I installed Desktop Drapes. That didn't run at all so I installed Wally. It runs but doesn't change the wallpaper. Finally, I gave up after 11.04 froze on me several times.

I approached the Unity desktop with an open mind but, after having tried it out, I find it restrictive and much prefer the good ol' Gnome desktop.

I'm installing 10.10 on my laptop now. I have a desktop computer and a netbook running 10.04 and a wife who thinks I spend too much time on "the computer". I think I will skip over Natty Newfoundland for the dog that it is.

Just wanted to say that I upgraded yesterday without issues (I was really afraid about GRUB like the old bug when having several operating systems and removing "the others" from the list). Everything seems to be working fine. I lost some compatibility (Like Virtual Box), but surely I will fix it upgrading that software to a new version.

I installed as an upgrade, things went well, but boy, my machine sure slowed down in performance. I was doing all the cool things with Compiz now it takes noticablly long to load Firefox and other programs. Going back to the last OS from Ubuntu, not staying with this one. Also, it did not set itself up for the internet. I could not access the internet for updates, but I could access my other computers on the network. I missed something here I guess.

I installed Ubuntu nearly a year ago when the end of support for XP was announced. At first I used it daily and was very enthusiastic for Linux. As time has gone on, I have decided Linux is just not for me and I am going to have to suck it up and stick with Windows.

I really like Ubuntu, but I'm just not willing to spend the inordinate amount of time required to get it to work. It is a great OS for experimenters and hobbyists, but I just don't think it is ever going to be a mainstream OS for the masses.

Now if someone could tell me of an easy way to get this off my machine...

Edit: After I posted this I went and upgraded to 11.04 for grins. It went smoothly, but my hardware won't run Unity so everything looks pretty much the same as before. I'll still try to work with it for awhile...

Give Linux Mint 10 (or wait for 11) a shot. It works out of the box and has everything you need to set up in Ubuntu already installed. The Mint devs also fix a lot of the bugs inherent in any new Ubuntu release. It's worth a shot if the other choice is to go back to Windows XP.

Give Linux Mint 10 (or wait for 11) a shot. It works out of the box and has everything you need to set up in Ubuntu already installed. The Mint devs also fix a lot of the bugs inherent in any new Ubuntu release. It's worth a shot if the other choice is to go back to Windows XP. Just a suggestion.

I downloaded the Mint 10 ISO and have run the live CD. I think I like Mint better than 11.04. I am pondering doing a dual boot on another XP machine I have. I'd really like Linux to work out for me as I don't like Windows 7 at all and I don't like where MS is going with their OSs.

I loved Ubuntu 10.10 with the Compiz 3d Desktop cube. Although I let Ubuntu upgrade itself to 11.04 (took 6 hours), I am back to my old desktop. I don't like Unity, things were radical changed for apparently no good reason. They did away with the bottom toolbar, without replacing it. I found the official sidebar replacement but it did not show me all of my active sessions. Number 1 reason to not use Unity, I want to be able to see all of my active sessions in one screen easily. Scrolling over icons sucks because you can't see them all at one time.

My 2nd reason for not using Unity, it is far inferior to the Compiz 3D Desktop Cube. I have never seen anything, anywhere better than that desktop. The only reason I'm sticking to 11.04 is because I can still have the best desktop ever. As soon as they update Ubuntu without it and not replacing it with something superior, then I will not update.

I have used Ubuntu for a long time and love it. Customization is a key part for me as for other several users I know, but Unity has several flaws in the design and is buggy.

To name a few:
- No notifications
- Aims for tablets and smaller screen devices (large icons with touch interface) but wastes a lot of space with suggested apps (1/3 of menu) and duplicates applications (frequently used)
- Is not consistent, large icons for apps but makes you click on links?
- No easy way to fix issues (no Alt + F2)
- Aimed at smaller devices and yet consumes more resources.
- Global menus should be an option (the two trends are tables and very large monitors). When using large monitors it makes you go all the way to the top of the screen.
Etc.

Unity can not get as simple as an Apple interface because it does not run in proprietary hardware; it will need to be customizable and easy to troubleshoot.

I am not going to use 11.04 and will keep an eye on what Ubuntu does to fix or ditch Unity.

I'm afraid that though I believe Unity can be a good step in UI evolution, this is not its prime time. I still see buggy behavior in the launcher hide/reveal. I'm not sold on the need for the OS-X style placement of app menus. It feels a bit gratuitous... two small unrelated issues that grabbed me as a fresh new user. This has the potential to mature into a great desktop.

This is the worst distro Ubuntu has put out to date.

If I convinced a client, friend or relative to go to Ubuntu 10.10, helped to get everything going (printer installed, find the right desktop) then I would have been a very very busy boy with the 11.04 upgrade. First, I had to reinstall (and google for the solution) my printer. Then the Unity desktop would have had them pulling their hair out, especially if they were using the Compiz 3D Desktop Cube.

I upgraded my Desktop computer from XP to 7 for $160 ($130 for OEM Windows 7 Professional 64 bit & $30 for 2 gig RAM). No problems. Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 problems.

Linux will never substantially grow until a non-techie, non-geek can go through a regular Linux/Ubuntu upgrade without my help. I thought 10.10 was awfully close but the 11.04 upgrade would be a disaster to the average computer user. The upgrades need to be much better than Windows for the general public to accept it. We've got the replacement programs, day to day superior reliability, almost no cost, but the upgrades are still waining.

On my Dell Mini 9 the netbook remix interface is really very useful. I would appear that the big icons in program categories is no longer supported. Too Bad! I'll wait and see if the powers that be will reconsider.

it's called:
we don't care if it works, get the money from the rubes so we can give ourselves a raise with the paycheque.

hmm, sounds like Microsoft doesn't it.

have to wait for Ubuntu's sp2 for it to be usable then Jack.

Instead of spending time and effort changing the interface with each version, why not spend them converting more Linux command line functions to GUI. Take a lesson from Apple: With each of their upgrades they make OSX more capable by converting Unix commands to easy to use functions.

On a walmart emachines, (amd x2, 2.7 Ghz, nvidia (LE or LS)6150 graphics:
1. The partition system was 'locked up', since I do multi-boot - and the installer mounts then unmounts 'all' partitions on the hard drive!! One of the 'active' Linux partition wouldn't do it; which then 'locked' everything up on the HD => This is 'after' the thing did 16,000 'eternal' downloads!! Why 'not' do the partition 'thing' in the beginning, in order to save time&server 'bandwidth' for everybody involved in this world??
2. Once 'installed', the Grub boot screen wouldn't&couldn't load; because the 'resolution' was said to be set too 'high'!!
3. (I did have to install Peppermint One, in order to get a usable Grub boot screen; to be able to multiboot => Ain't that completely&absolutely 'ridiculous' to have to resort to a small, but very&extremely 'capable' distro - to be able to boot the 'big one')!!
4. Once 'booted', it did have the 'lowest' resolution on tap; without me being able to change it!! => I did have to download&install the latest (recommended) 'nvidia' driver, which was said to be 'needed' for 'unity' => So why not install the 'stupid thing' in the first place!! => Why 'not', Lord; oh why 'not'??
5. The initial Live CD screen is 'gnome'; but once installed, it becomes 'unity' => The same happened to me on ubuntu 10.10 proper on a netbook, where the installation started out pure 'gnome'; and then converted itself to 'unwanted' unity - later on!!
I do agree:
1. 'Noobs' should 'run away' from 11.04, in order not to 'sour' their 'tastes&experiences' of Linux!!
2. As always: It will (hopefully) take 'Mint' to 'straighten out' this thing, and make it 'usable' for everybody in this world!!

I too had problems upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04. The platform is a new (6 months old) Dell laptop that was running Ubuntu 10.10. That was my first experience with Ubuntu although I'm an old Unix guru from WAY back and have lots of experience with RedHat/Fedora.

I upgraded from the update manager when it prompted me to upgrade to 11.04 and let it run while I was doing other things. Everything seemed to load and install cleanly but when it was done, my touchpad was non-functional. I tried using the keyboard button that toggles it on/off several times with no effect so after muttering some words that I won't bother to print here, I went searching for a USB mouse that I could plug in to get access to the system. After finding one and plugging it in I was able to use the system but I still could not figure out what was wrong with the touchpad. I searched for updated drivers and found none (Dell doesn't even know how to spell Linux on their support site!). After fighting with the Unity desktop for hours I finally got into the touchpad configuration program and it looked fine. Out of desperation, I disabled the touchpad, exited the program, fired it up again, enabled the touchpad, and voila! The touchpad worked. I spent a total of several hours getting over that little glitch.

Now on to the Unity desktop...

I'm an old Mac user (from a while ago) so I'm somewhat familiar with the interface that they are trying to present but that said, I am having a terrible time finding things like my recent documents and applications (Yes, I know there is a button with those labels but my docs/apps don't seem to be in there!). The system settings being somewhat hidden in the icon at the far right of the menu bar was completely strange to me. Why would they try to hide that? The only way I found that was by searching the web. Is there any good intro to Unity anywhere?

I'm giving Unity a try at Jack Wallen's recommendation and I hope I can get over the initial hurtles before I get too frustrated and go back to my command line windows.

One very annoying thing that I have not yet figured out is how to configure the workspaces. I have not found any configuration options GUI for this yet and I'm getting more and more annoyed with this. I'm used to using a 1x8 workspace setup and the 2x2 default setup doesn't cut it for me. If anyone out there can help, I'd be VERY appreciative. I found an online blurb about manually editing the configuration settings which I tried but it was already set to my previous values of 1x8 so Unity is obviously using a different set of configuration settings.

This is the first time I've tried to use Linux from a bootable USB key instead of a Live CD, and I must admit I'm very pleased and impressed so far. Creating the key was straight-forward and painless. Using it on both an Atom-powered netbook and an AMD quad-core powered notebook has proven to be very smooth and trouble-free. I created the key with Persistence so that changes to the basic install are saved on the key, and that's also working well so far. The new look and feel of Ubuntu 11.04 is surprisingly easy to adapt to, and quickly becomes easy to use. It may be a while before I actually install Linux on any of my computers, but if this USB-based experience continues to shine, I have an old Toshiba laptop using XP that will likely find itself home to a new Ubuntu installation this summer.

I tried the upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04 all worked well to the next time I rebooted and I got an error giving me 4 choices all of which did not work to I had to reload 10.10 from CD, reparting to drive. That went okay so reboot update the fixes - took a life time - rebooted and upgraded again. This time all worked well, but do not like to Unity desktop switch back to Classic Seems to run Okay now...

Does kubuntu, then, now have the unity desktop?

I think I tried to update the day after it was released. First I tried to create a USB installation like I have in the past. I wouldn't work when I booted to it. Not wanting to download another .iso I tried the update. After a couple of tries it took 16 hours with occasionally checking the computer to answer questions. I'm wondering if there was heavy traffic trying to download 11.04 slowing things down. The Saturday after release and a couple of tries my son was able to create a useable USB installation key to install it on his machine.
Now that I can actually use it, it is quite different and will take me a little time getting used to. But I haven't had any issue running it on my netbook. More messing about before I decide to stick with the Unity interface...

Installed on Mom&Dad's old laptop.
They are the opposite of power users.
Their laptop was loaded with crapware/malware/WinXP, boot time was 18 minutes.
I had them running on Ubuntu10 from a 4GB USB stick last week as a test and they loved it. This Sunday, installed Ubuntu11.04 from an 8GB USB stick, some struggle on my side but relatively smooth. My only worry was their wireless network is different. When they got the laptop home, they called, I walked them thru connection to SSID:linksys and boom, unshackled from Microsoft, running Ubuntu+Firefox and I look like the good son.

Still holding my breath and waiting for more calls but so far so good, Ubuntu really is for Mom&Dad.

Install was easy. Went back to standard Gnome desktop. Also noticed that the Software Center stopped working after installing a few programs. It starts to load but never does quite make it.
That was on my test system. My Desktop and Laptop still have 10.04 on them.

VirtualBox wouldn't install in 11.04. Tried both the current VB package and the just released new one. That is a deal breaker for me. So I guess I have to wait for the next Ubuntu version. I'm disappointed, after an initial good impression of Ubuntu from 10.10.

I'm a reasonably good Windows Techie, but didn't have any success installing version 10, so I doubt I'll try 11. I tried adding it to my drive which had Win 7 on it. It went through what looked like an install and added Ubuntu to the boot list, but when I tried it, nothing happened, just a blank screen. After several tries I gave up. Hearing about the problem the author had with 11 doesn't make me want to try it either.

The problem you encountered once you booted into Natty either LiveCD or an actual installation is that (nasty descriptive adjective) "Nouveau" driver. The open source version of the Nvidia driver. Unity requires a video driver capable of 3D acceleration which the nouveau driver does not have out of the box. It has to be enabled via the "Additional drivers" applet and even then it's experimental. Might as well install the real Nvidia driver while you're in the applet which works like a charm. The ironic thing is the Intel 45/43 GMA driver which is capable of 3D acceleration by default is built right into the Linux kernel that comes with Ubuntu (and even most other distros with older kernels) so the on board video of the majority of desktop PC motherboards will run Unity without a problem. Those with laptops are another story though. Canonical dropped the ball on this one especially for those with Nvidia video cards. Not too sure about ATI though.

On a side note, if Ubuntu actually became pre-installed on the more popular PCs (desktop and mobile) as Windows does, users would never encounter these problems. But then reality sets in.

I was running 10.10 studio. I tried the upgrade from the Upgrade manager (after reading and following release notes recomendations) and the sytem would not boot I got a failure dpkg exited with error 2
I am now re-partitioning and trying a fresh install. So far so bad.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyNarwhal/ReleaseNotes

Not that Canonical actually links to them on the download page, or keeps relnotes for releases in the same place or anything, but does no one read them?

Unity is great on netbooks. And less great on desktops. Too limited. No compiz any longer. Actually, butchered compiz.
KDE 4.6.2 though comes around pretty okay. Will move more and more on KDE in future, I guess. Gnome is totally set on touch screen interfaces, but I hate sticky, filthy touch screens.

I first tried using clean instal with btrfs partitions. Mostly installed OK but Nvidia drivers had to be tweaked as it didn't seem to pick the right ones for my card. Don't like Unity much, takes a while to get to what I want. Most annoying thing is the left-hand menu bar doesn't always fully deploy, it comes out half-way but not enough to select anything, takes a few retries to get it fully out enough to use it.

But the worst change was the boot up time, which was topping 2 minutes or more compared to less than half a minute under 10.10. A colleague suggested I reinstal with ext4 instead of btrfs, and after I did this the boot time improved markedly (though still seems slower than 10.10). Interestingly enough it also picked up the correct Nvidia driver this time around.

I had already switched to Xubuntu on my notebook, thanks to suggestions from others. I tried to upgrade the notebook and my laptop (which was running Ubuntu 10.10) using the upgrade from the net option. Neither worked. After chugging away for quite a while, on both machines I got a message something like "can't compute upgrade, this could be because of third party software installed or..." something else.

I then made two CDs for Xubuntu (i386 and AMD64). On the netbook (which was already running Xubuntu), the installer gave me an option of keeping my data, and later migrating my desktop settings from the old installation to the new one. This worked well.

For the laptop, which was running Ubuntu, it ended up saying that it could not find a suitable old installation. Since I had backed up everything, I then let it go ahead and do a clean install. That worked OK.

The major problems I have found: SOUND!!!! On the notebook, my sound card is not even detected. On the laptop, sound works OK for some things, but the microphone is not detected by Skype for the internal microphone, for one plugged into the microphone jack, the built in one, nor the one in my logitech web-cam (although the video part works fine).

An interesting side note: when I first got the eeePC and installed Kubuntu on it, the sound worked flawlessly, even for Skype. In fact it was the only LINUX installation that I had where the sound worked so well.

Overall, from my experience over the years, I would say that the biggest problem faced by someone trying to move from Windows or OS-X to any LINUX that I have ever tried is the difficulty in getting sound and video to work seamlessly for Skype and even for things like YouTube or .wmv attachments.

The Video Card only works in 800x600.

On old hardware classic Athlon. 512 meg ram and ATI 550 video, just got purple variegated desktop background, no icons on left side of screen...screwed around & went to Ubuntu forums, eventually reinstalled 10.10
g??

I ran the beta version of 11.04 last February in a VM on my system (using VMWare Player) and got a glimpse of therelease. I had tried running the Netbook Remix of 10.10 from a Live CD on my Thinkpad last year, but it simply wouldn't work at all, so I was hesitant to try an upgrade with the final release, but it turned out to be a no-brainer. The Thinkpad took the released version from an ISO just fine, and I'm using it now. I performed an in-place upgrade on a Desktop system last week, and it is also working pretty well. I did note that Update Manager was nagging me to install some newly released updates today, and those just finished.

Don't get discouraged by these installation stumbles. Canonical is working hard to get the updates out, so I wouldn't give up on them just yet. Yes, the NVidia problems are a royal pain, but they can be resolved with patience. I do like the option to boot into either "classic" Gnome or the new Unity desktop, but wish they would make this a little clearer on the login screen. Most people are going to just log in as normal, and may not be prepared for the re-design, but that just suggests they didn't bother reading the release notes (as if anyone ever reads the fine manual until they have a problem).

I have tried several install of 11.04 Ubuntu, only to be greeted by a grub rescue prompt.
Kubuntu 11.04 works fine on same machine.

Feedback from the date of installation. 03-05-2011

I found one very disturbing feature my system never had before.
I did read about it in the past, with earlier Ubuntu versions.
From the date of installation, Windows 7 does tries to update it self and after rebooting it seems to do so. As soon it reaches the 15%, it reverts the installation and reboots again.
To start without the updates. After a while it all starts all over again.
Trying to force the install is complete useless.
I am now looking for the earlier document in Ubuntu about this issue.
May be one of you has the sollution so that all my windows versions and linux versions do update if needed without interfeering with each other. Like it did in the past?

I've been an Ubuntu user for some time now (since Hoary Hedgehog). Normally I don't upgrade, but do a fresh install, because is much faster and less prone to configuration mishaps.
I use an Eee-PC 1000HA as my main machine, and since Lucid Lynx I've experienced a problem with the Live CD installation where it starts ok, but when it starts installing the packages, an error dialog pops up and the whole thing goes kaputt. The solution was to use the alternate cd, and haven't had a problem ever since. Now, for Natty, I first installed it in a partition I set aside for experimenting. The installation was flawless. I used it for a few of days, and decided it was time to have NN in my main partition. I keep /home in a different partition, and after a full backup to be on the safe side, started the installation process. Again, it was flawless.
Now, regarding Unity: It's new. It's different. And as with all things new and different, there will always be people who despise it. I say give it time. Get used to it almost like you are used to Gnome or KDE. Then decide. Just give it a fair chance. I was exploring AWN before Unity, and I intend to check Gnome Shell. Then I will decide which one I will keep.
I've been a Linux user since 1996, when I installed Slackware from an unbelievable number of floppy disks, and with extensive tweaking and configuring afterwards. Man, it was FUN!
I've tried several distros after Slackware: Caldera (Later Mandrake and now Mandriva), Fedora, SUSE, Debian (and several derivatives), and I decided to settle with Ubuntu. Why? Because it just works. I did my time troubleshooting installations.
Nowadays I only want to have a very nice experience using my machine. Ubuntu gives me that.

I had been running ubuntu se for about a week when the update to 10.04 became available. I did the update. My desktop and screen-savers still were SE but it killed VLC. Anytime I played an avi file or DVD the playback was jerky and it would hang. This was true even with the default player. I uninstalled VCL but it made no effect. I plan to move my files to another machine and burn an CD to install from. I like Mint too but I don't have it on any of my machines at the moment. I was waiting for their new release with Office-Lbre.

Just reverted to Ubuntu 10.10. Tried and tried on my test box to get 11.04 stable and working, but have never had so many problems. Most come down to the age of the test hardware. always been OK as if it runs on test it will run on anything.

2 core P4 3.06 Mhz Intel CPU 2.0 GB RAM

I think the problem is the GPU which is an aging nVidia MX440

Tried Mint 10 but I want FF4 and LibreOffice, tried Xubuntu 11.04 was OK but have decided to upgrade the test box and try the upgrade from 10.10 again, meantime going to install on a modern machine via VMPlayer and see if it does the trick.

Just reverted to Ubuntu 10.10. Tried and tried on my test box to get 11.04 stable and working, but have never had so many problems. Most come down to the age of the test hardware. always been OK as if it runs on test it will run on anything.

2 core P4 3.06 Mhz Intel CPU 2.0 GB RAM

I think the problem is the GPU which is an aging nVidia MX440

Tried Mint 10 but I want FF4 and LibreOffice, tried Xubuntu 11.04 was OK but have decided to upgrade the test box and try the upgrade from 10.10 again, meantime going to install on a modern machine via VMPlayer and see if it does the trick.

I upgraded from Maverick to Natty on my notebook and had a similar experience. I did think it was unique to my setup though, so it is disappointing to learn that it's not.

After upgrading (which insisted that I remove KDE components first, which were installed through my testing of Kexi) I noted some errors saying that the upgrade could not completed. Specifically the xorg-server was mentioned. I had no choice but to restart, which presented me with a blank screen. The system was responsive however, and ctrl-alt-F1 got me to a terminal where I mounted the ISO that I had upgraded from and ran the distupgrade script in cli mode. That seemed to run the upgrade again, although it did much faster than the initial upgrade.

After rebooting I had the Unity interface, but only after installing the updates from the internet did things work properly.

There are some things that are annoying:
* The don't like the lack of menu under the Ubuntu button (top left).
* I would like to customise the top bar and move the dashbar to the bottom (I used docky before and will put it back somehow).
* My status icons in the topbar are just the way they were before, the menus are the same, so something wasn't upgrades I suppose. I did overwrite all the config files when I was prompted during the upgrade.
* My home folder is not encrypted and I wasn't prompted to do it either. I don't want it encrypted anyway, so I'm not phased.

I'm technically capable of hacking around, but don't want to. So I'm not sure that I will upgrade other machines to Natty as this stage.

Put new GPU in test machine, still nVidia to make it a good test all went well and 11.04 installed just fine.

Going round the other machines in the house and so far the upgrade is smooth, Unity is OK when you get used to it, some people in the house are sticking with classic.

Whew.

Canonical have done a lot to restore Linux's reputation as being for technical geeks only, which is a shame. There are (were?) a lot of people out there who kept some pretty old hardware running with good results and this could cause problems.

I love Gnome but was more than happy to give whatever the Ubuntu guys came up with a good serious looking at. After a few days I've now switched back to the classic desktop, I found Unity very slow (my machine a pretty good spec'), I also found the cursor dragging behind as I typed causing me to keep looking up to see how it was getting on!
I couldn't warm to the interface at all, maybe I'm more stuck in the mud than I would like to think but I reckon it's just that in comparison to Gnome, Unity is rubbish.