as usual i like to have a mess about with ubuntu alpha versions. this time it’s a look at ubuntu 12.04 (precise pangolin…again…fine work there people) an LTS release which means it’ll get support until april of 2017…that’s a while. get the daily iso from here and burn it to a dvd or whap it onto a usb stick using dd or unetbootin. the install process still features a lot of the artwork from 11.10…unity is still in use…and looks much the same as it did previously…and that’s not, in this users opinion, a good thing. in fact if you follow this post down you’ll see that i quickly tire of ubuntu 12.04 and turned it into xubuntu 12.04…
doing the initial update using apt-get update and then apt-get dist-upgrade (as root). a couple of the ‘extra. repositories were unavailable. also neither ai32-libs or ia32-libs-multiarch would install due to dependency problems.
this build of ubuntu is shipping with firefox 9 and thunderbird 9 but by the time april 2012 rolls around both of these will probably have morphed to version 11 with no noticeable improvements.
as i said…they’re sticking with unity. just as feature-rich as always…
not too light on resources either but then i’ve got a bit of ram to spare.
now as i mentioned before…unity isn’t for me. i could have installed gnome 3 but prefer things to be slightly more configurable so here’s how to add xfce as a desktop environment…in other words change ubuntu 12.04 into xubuntu 12.04…
as root issue the command apt-get install xubuntu-desktop this will grab 120MB or so from the repositories…after it has finished log out. when you’re greeted with the log in screen click the wee gear icon next to your username and choose ‘xfce session’ or whatever. this’ll give you something slightly more usable. i’ve used xfce a fair bit in the past…still not 100% sure of it but it kicks unity’s arse…see below for a quick look.
too many icons…not sure why all my drives have to be shown by default. right-click the bottom menu and go into panel options to make it auto-hide.
ah…proper menus…bliss…
and there’s my daily look at el reg…with some thumbnails…
to sum up. ubuntu’s going in the wrong direction for me interface-wise. they won’t change and i don’t think i’ll ever like it. for an alpha version it seems stable though…adding xfce makes it a lot nicer to use. how long will i stick with it? probably until this afternoon.
