May 122013
 

xubuntu-ringtail-bottom-panel

Last year I’ve bought a new desktop computer and on this one I’ve moved from Ubuntu to Mint as “Home distribution”, but I still have as backup PC an old laptop with Ubuntu, and some days ago I’ve updated it from Xubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, these are my observations about this new release of Ubuntu.

First: I’ve heard that Unity has improved in this release, but I really don’t like this Desktop Environment and so I’ll only talk about Xubuntu, so Ubuntu 13.04 with XFCE, one of my favorite DE for GNU/Linux along Fluxbox, Openbox and Cinnamon (in this order).

So let’s see how to upgrade and what’s new in this release of Xubuntu.
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Apr 022013
 

More and more games are published for Linux and so it’s becoming more important to have a good performance with our beloved system, but some of the Desktop Environemnts can really slow down your gaming experience.

There is an interesting report about this on Phoronix in the article: Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and these are their conclusions:

Overall the results were interesting from the range of Linux OpenGL benchmarks conducted under Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, KDE Plasma, and Xfce on Ubuntu 12.04. There are some exceptions, but across the driver configurations the desktops to commonly perform the best were Xfce 4.8 and GNOME Shell 3.2.2.1. The default Unity desktop was a mix in terms of performance across the different OpenGL workloads.

So there are good chance that you can speed up your graphics performance, how ?
Use Fsgamer
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Dec 302012
 

On the 21 of December Linux Mint 14 Xfce has been released, codename Nadia.
This release of Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.10 and shipped with the XFCE desktop environemnt as my readers probably know I’ve installed Mint 13 XFCE on my new desktop and so I’ve decided to upgrade my installation to this new release.

As first thing, do I suggest to upgrade to this release ?
Yes and no, Mint 13 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 that is a Long Term Support distribution, this means that like other LTS releases 12.04 will have updates for 3 years, and will include point releases that bundle updates to shorten downloads for users installing the release later in its lifecycle. The point releases and dates are: 12.04.1 (23 August 2012), 12.04.2 (31 January 2013), 12.04.3 (15 August 2013) and 12.04.4 (24 January 2014). There are no further point releases scheduled after the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

So if you are happy with your software and all your hardware works you have no strong reasons to do this.

On the other hand, if like me you have a D-LINK N 150 aka DWA-125 or some other hardware that don’t work perfectly with your Kernel an update could help you, spoiler: This upgrade helped me in removing all the proprietary drivers in my installation.
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Get information on your hardware with hardinfo

On a former article I’ve presented 3 command line commands that you can use to get information on your Linux box: lsusb, lspci and lshw, they are really good and I use the first 2 in a lot of situation where I want to check if all my devices works correctly. Today I’ll propose to [...]

XFCE 4.10 on Ubuntu 12.04

I’m a Xubuntu user, and so i was a bit disappointed that for some days my Xubuntu 12.04 missed the 4.10 release of XFCE. Luckily there is an easy way to install this version of XFCE on Ubuntu, there is an PPA that can bring the new feature of XFCE in your Ubuntu  in few [...]