First Impressions of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

I decided to try out the latest build of Ubuntu's next future release, version 11.04 Natty Narwhal, in a VirtualBox VM. I downloaded a pre-alpha daily build and so far have been impressed with the stability and ease of installation.

As with Maverick, the installer is clean, polished and easy, and continues the trend of asking most of the configuration questions once the actual installation process has started to save time. You also have the opportunity to install third party programs, such as Fluendo's MP3 codec, at the time of installation, which is nice.

At this point, I don't think they've switched over to the proposed Unity interface by default, so I can't say whether I'll have a better experience with it now than I did on my netbook a few months back, but I'll update this post with more information as soon as I have it.

As for its performance in a VM environment, everything is stable and the VBox Guest Additions installed just fine, imparting mouse pointer integration and support for arbitrary resolutions. The only thing lacking is 3D acceleration within the VM, but I assume this will be supported at a later date.

Overall, the experience is not significantly different from that of 10.10 Maverick so far, but I expect things to change rapidly in the near future. I'll keep this post updated with any changes I find.

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Ubuntu Maverick on VirtualBox

The third alpha release of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat was just released, so I figured I'd give it a shot in the ol' VirtualBox VM.

The Pros: Mouse pointer integration is built-in, so you don't have to deal with reinstalling Guest Additions every time you do a kernel update.

The Cons: Since Maverick started using a new X-Server (1.9), Guest Additions no longer do their acceleration and resolution magic. This includes manually adding resolutions to the xorg.conf, so until something changes, it's 800x600 all the way...

UPDATE (9/30/2010): Looks like the open source edition of VirtualBox has us covered now. Just open up a terminal and type (all one line):

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) ; sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11

Thanks for the tip, Anonymous!

I'm putting this here for my own reference, but if you want to automatically mount your host's shared directory in your Linux guest OS, you can edit /etc/fstab thusly:

[host's name of directory] [mount point] vboxsf defaults 0 0

which, for me, translates to:

vbox_share /media/vbox vboxsf defaults 0 0

No more tedious mounting and no mucking around with startup scripts running as root...

Something else I've encountered, not specific to Maverick, but I figured I'd share it here anyway:

I decided to give BTRFS a shot, so I formatted my partitions with it (it still won't support booting, so I had to make a small boot partition with ext4, but / and /home are BTRFS). Unfortunately, there is a hellacious bug somewhere that causes apt-get update/upgrade to be godawful slow (like, 4 hrs. for a big-but-still-reasonable upgrade) with this FS. However, I came across this blog post that suggests using a patched copy of dpkg, which is available from this ppa, which specializes in BTRFS-optimized packages. To add the PPA, add it to your sources in Synaptic or open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brian-rogers/btrfs

Then just update/upgrade as usual. The package comes with a pretty scary warning about how it can hose your system, so you should take frequent snapshots (that's why you're using BTRFS anyway, right? Right??). Unfortunately, this didn't really fix my problem, so it's back to ext4 for me. :(

Once perk of reinstalling using the latest Beta release package is that I got to check out the new installer. It looks really nice and they've done some really smart things with concurrency whereby it starts installing your system before it asks you all of the time-consuming personalization questions. All in all, installation was easy and fast, fast, fast!

Everything else appears unchanged since Lucid.

I'll update this post as I find anything else out. If anyone has anything to add, feel free to leave a comment.

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Testing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 1

The latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, known as Lucid Lynx, was just released the other day and, though it is an early alpha release, I wanted to give it a shot in a virtual machine. Installation in VirtualBox was smooth and polished, but I ran into some problems with installing VBox's Guest Additions, which allow for higher resolutions and, more importantly, mouse pointer integration (the magic that lets you move your cursor from host to guest OSs without mucking around with capturing the mouse pointer).

Here is a simple fix for the mouse pointer integration:

Fire up a terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

This file used to be how Ubuntu managed devices attached to your computer, but they're trying to move away from it. Now, the system will accept such a file, but it tries to figure things out on-the-fly as much as it can, hence the currently-empty file.

So, into this empty file, copy/paste:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "VBoxMouse"
Driver "vboxmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection

All this is doing is telling your virtual machine to look for the vboxmouse driver and use it. Now, when you reboot, you should have proper mouse integration.

However, if this somehow causes problems and you want to undo it, just type into a terminal:

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and then reboot your system.

To fix the small resolution, you just need to add another section to your xorg.conf, so type into a terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

and below the mouse section, paste in:

Section "Screen"

DefaultDepth 24

SubSection "Display"

Depth 15

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Depth 16

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Depth 24

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

SubSection "Display"

Depth 8

Modes "1920x1440" "1920x1200" "1900x1200" "1920x1080" "1600x1200" "1680x1050" "1600x1024" "1600x1000" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1440x900" "1280x960" "1366x768" "1280x800" "1152x864" "1280x768" "1280x720" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

EndSubSection

Device "Device[0]"

Identifier "Screen[0]"

Monitor "Monitor[0]"

EndSection

Important: Each of the lines that start with "Modes" should have all of the resolutions following it on the same line, and they should only include resolutions that your monitor can actually produce, so you might have to delete some of them (e.g., my monitor is a 20" that only goes up to 1680x1050, so I deleted all of the resolutions that were greater than this).

Again, if this causes any problems, you can either delete the section of the xorg.conf file or delete the xorg.conf file entirely and then reboot to get things back to the way they were.

Shared folders between the guest and host also appear to be broken at the moment, but I don't know what to do about it. Other than that, things have gone well for me. Compiz works fine and I have a fancy composite desktop with wobbly windows and true transparency.

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