[ale] Ubuntu Desktop 13.10

[JD]

Hi Ed,

Is Canonical still tracking users by default?  I was under the impression that
any release after 12.04 had tracking included.



On 10/19/2013 09:32 AM, Edward Holcroft wrote:
> Just upgraded my 3 home Ubuntu boxes to 13.10.
> 
> Was a seamless upgrade on 2 machines (64 bit). On one 8 year-old notebook that
> gets used heavily for Facebook etc every day (32 bit) everything froze up half
> way through. It seemed like the CPU became overheated during installation - was
> very hot to the touch. Could run a command line and top did not reveal anything
> out of the ordinary like a CPU spike. I was unable to get dpkg to release the
> sources.list file no matter what kills I tried, so did a reboot followed by
> live-DVD repair. The repair option is pretty impressive - found the broken 13.10
> installation and fixed it while keeping all data files intact as well as the
> Doze 7 on dual boot left unharmed.
> 
> Seems to be a minor upgrade, I'm not seeing any real visual differences, other
> than a bunch of new lenses, which I don't really use extensively. New kernel of
> course, and latest versions of various apps. This leads me to think about 14.04,
> which I would guess, would be another minor upgrade, given that it's LTS. If
> that's the case, and I cannot see Canonical going ott on an LTS release, it'd
> make for two fairly boring releases consecutively, which is interesting given
> the recent releases that have been bleeding edge to the point of being
> sub-functional if not broken in some areas. I'm kinda pleased they focused on
> just getting things stable rather than going with the threatened move to Mir at
> this point. I recently switched my work desktop to Wheezy stable (bit of an
> overreaction I guess, I could've dropped back to 12.04 or so, but I've always
> wanted to try a Debian desktop) 'cos Unity was just breaking on me way too
> often. It'll be really interesting/surprising if they bring Mir in for 14.04.
> 
> On the 32 bit version, Chrome still seems to be broken. This issue from 13.04 is
> still there: 
> 
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/359530/google-chrome-update-wont-install-due-to-unmet-dependencies
> 
> Although you can make it work if you try, it'd be nice to see a fixed version
> released.
> 
> Another issue that came up on one of my 64 bit boxes (although I don't think
> it's a specifically 64 bit issue) is too little disk space on /boot, so the
> upgrade failed until that was addressed. I had too many kernels in there and had
> to delete the old ones. I used this handy script that I've used many times on my
> Amazon Ubuntu servers:
> 
> dpkg -l linux-* | awk '/^ii/{ print $2}' | grep -v -e `uname -r | cut -f1,2
> -d"-"` | grep -e [0-9] | xargs sudo apt-get -y purge
> 
> from here:
> 
> http://tuxtweaks.com/2010/10/remove-old-kernels-in-ubuntu-with-one-command/
> 
> I see this as an unacceptable error on a distro aimed at easy installation, noob
> demographic. Most noobs I know would've run a mile at an error like that. Of
> course, if this was fresh installation, I would not have experienced this issue
> since there'd be no old kernels installed. But why on earth would there be a
> limit (and apparently a relatively low one at that) on /boot on a distro of this
> nature?
> 
> Anyway, that's my quick first experience with 13.10 ... it works, a bit of a
> yawn, frankly. Nothing that jumps out at me to say don't touch this. Still a
> great distro for first timers, and even experienced users as long as Unity can
> hold it together under high user demands.
> 
> cheers
> ed
> 
> --