[GRLUG] Ubuntu 7.10

[Bob Kline]

I've seen problems with Firefox
under 7.04 if I leave it up long
enough.  Seems to depend on what
I'm doing with Firefox.  Number of
windows, and maybe what's in them.

Sometimes it will go a long time
without problems,  and other times
I'll get a hard wedge.  The screen
locks up.  I reboot, because I don't
have a separate terminal hooked up,
but it does come to that.

Sad.  Control of memory leakage
has long been a hallmark of Unix
and Linux.  Using the supplied
memory control routines you wonder
how the application writers get it
wrong.  But then,  I suppose Firefox
could be tight,  and the plugins are
the problem?   There are lots of them,
and who knows who wrote some of
them.

    -Bob


On Nov 1, 2007 4:45 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/1/07, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's been a couple of weeks now
> > since the launch,  does anyone here
> > have anything good to say about
> > Ubuntu 7.10?
> >
> > Many of the reviews have been
> > quite bullish.  I'm running
> > Kubuntu 7.04 now,  and have so
> > far taking an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
> > approach.  But I'd hate to miss out on
> > anything either....
> >
> >
>
> I actually wrote a second review on my blog, earlier this week.
> Here's the text:
>
> So I've been using it a couple weeks, now, and I figured it was a good
> time to give it a second look.
>
> I've had to leave Compiz enabled, because without it, It becomes a
> hassle to have both Firefox open and watch videos using mplayer.
> (Firefox hogs X11's XV extension, thanks to the flash plugin. Compiz
> seems to perform the functional equivalent of providing a separate
> copy of the extension to anyone who asks for it.) As a result, I've
> learned a bit about its behavior.
>
> The alt-tab behavior is nice. I realize some of you more advanced
> folks (Including OS X users and Linux folks using experimental window
> managers as far back as 2002) have had window previews in your
> window-switching service for a while. Sure, yeah, it's a convenient
> feature if you've got multiple windows from the same app loaded. (Web
> development with Firefox would be a lot easier if I had this at work.)
> At home, that's not really an issue for me.
>
> What's really nice is how passing through the alt-tab list draws the
> window immediately to the foreground, before I let go of alt-tab.
> (FWIW, all my apps are full-screen at home, so I don't know if the
> window order is permanently adjusted as I pass through.) Now, on
> Windows, this would be a problem. Each time a portion of a window
> becomes visible, Windows sends the application a paint message to get
> it to redraw itself. At work, when my box was churning over one thing
> or another, or waiting on some silly user-global lock (Damn you Visual
> Studio, damn yooou!), I could watch the application ponderously fill
> in the window with information.
>
> In Gutsy Gibbon, with Compiz enabled, the screen contents just flip to
> the window, pre-drawn. (If I had to guess, I'd think the window never
> knew it was covered.) The screen changes quickly enough that the new
> data appears to be there right at the start of the screen's next
> vertical refresh.
>
> Also, there's a neat feature for dealing with unstable applications.
> If the application "stops responding", to steal a phrase from the
> Windows world, the window desaturates until it's wholly in grayscale.
> That way, you know why it's not doing what you thought it was doing.
> This doesn't seem to work entirely, though. I was scrolling through
> Google Reader--albeit painfully slowly--when the window desaturated. I
> hadn't stopped scrolling, and the window was still updating, but the
> window manager decided for some reason that the window had stopped
> responding. However, it corrected itself, and resaturated the window
> after I stopped rolling the scroll wheel on my mouse.
>
> However, Firefox seems to have taken a hit. It's weird. Up until a
> couple weeks ago, I never had noticeable stability problems with
> Firefox, at work or home, despite both machines being low-end (3GHz or
> 2.2GHz P4s, respectively, though the work machine has 2GB of RAM and
> the home machine only has 512MB/). In contrast, it's run slow or
> crashed three times in the last week. This is only at home, though. My
> box at work is still running strong. The obvious answer is that
> Firefox's memory leaks are likely coming into play earlier on my home
> box.
>
> And I'm still irritated that I can't play StepMania. That might change
> this weekend, though.
>
>
> --
> :wq
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