As you may know, Lucid Lynx is approaching fast and it is going to be released on 29th of April as “Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS”. This release provides a lot of visible and invisible changes. There is plenty of work ahead still, as there are quite a few bugs that need to be fixed before the actual release
Ubuntu One, being now part of Ubuntu has also changed.
First of all, there is no applet anymore.
Q: What? No applet, where do we need to click now to start the service?
A: It will be autostarted if you have associated your computer with Ubuntu One.
And I really mean that it will autostart. If you are a user of Ubuntu One in Karmic you may have heard or experienced various issues related to weird syncdaemon state changes causing the client to crash. In order to make it work, syncdaemon state machine was rewritten and it actually works. The only issue left currently is LP:522604 but I hope that syncdaemon team will be able to fix that before Lucid release.
Lucid Lynx introduced the concept of MeMenu, The indicator that is designed to give the user easy control for changing their instant message status. Right now it can do much more than that. You can use it to post your tweets/dents (via gwibber DBus service, nice?). And you can use it to start ubuntuone-preferences - “Ubuntu One…”
Ubuntu One control panel now has much more buttons than the applet’s panel had and it now provides the info about sync status, your account status, your devices status and you have knobs to control bandwidth preferences.
Ubuntu One now gives us the ability to start synchronizing any folder in your $HOME. This is called User Designated Folders and you are no longer required to use a single “Ubuntu One” folder to sync your data. Of course, by default Ubuntu One is used, as this is a so-called ‘root’ UDF.
We now have public files as well so you can share files (not folders, to share the folder the other person will need Ubuntu One account) with everyone. There will be changes for the way redirects are working so that files will be served off ubuntuone.com server, not one.ubuntu.com/p/. This will prevent script execution in security context of the main server. Currently this is performed via Content-Disposition: attachment header which is not that friendly to wget and all browsers that do not support RFC2231.
Unfortunately there is one aspect of UbuntuOne that still needs to be addressed before I feel that the product is really awesome. The speed of startup, scan and upload. Currently Ubuntu One will work extremely well for 500 files or so (the size does not actually matter much in this case). But if you start using it with 30k+ files then you will need to make your computer running 24/7 in order not to experience bugs LP:531273 and LP:436612.
However, this product is still in beta phase and most of the issues that were giving real bad experience in 1.0 version were actually fixed. I am now keeping my Documents in Ubuntu One UDF and this works pretty good. Not super-fast, though.
I am constantly poking developers about various issues I find (hopefully they are not thinking about kicking me from the channel yet) so I am well aware of the issues that still exist. It is a feature freeze now in Lucid so the development is slowed down, but I am aware of great plans for performance increase for Maverick Meerkat.
As always, feel free to come to #ubuntuone channel on FreeNode in case you need some help with ubuntuone. My nick is rye there and if you say “honk” I will magically appear in the channel :)
Ubuntu One, being now part of Ubuntu has also changed.
First of all, there is no applet anymore.
Q: What? No applet, where do we need to click now to start the service?
A: It will be autostarted if you have associated your computer with Ubuntu One.
And I really mean that it will autostart. If you are a user of Ubuntu One in Karmic you may have heard or experienced various issues related to weird syncdaemon state changes causing the client to crash. In order to make it work, syncdaemon state machine was rewritten and it actually works. The only issue left currently is LP:522604 but I hope that syncdaemon team will be able to fix that before Lucid release.
Lucid Lynx introduced the concept of MeMenu, The indicator that is designed to give the user easy control for changing their instant message status. Right now it can do much more than that. You can use it to post your tweets/dents (via gwibber DBus service, nice?). And you can use it to start ubuntuone-preferences - “Ubuntu One…”
Ubuntu One control panel now has much more buttons than the applet’s panel had and it now provides the info about sync status, your account status, your devices status and you have knobs to control bandwidth preferences.
Ubuntu One now gives us the ability to start synchronizing any folder in your $HOME. This is called User Designated Folders and you are no longer required to use a single “Ubuntu One” folder to sync your data. Of course, by default Ubuntu One is used, as this is a so-called ‘root’ UDF.
We now have public files as well so you can share files (not folders, to share the folder the other person will need Ubuntu One account) with everyone. There will be changes for the way redirects are working so that files will be served off ubuntuone.com server, not one.ubuntu.com/p/. This will prevent script execution in security context of the main server. Currently this is performed via Content-Disposition: attachment header which is not that friendly to wget and all browsers that do not support RFC2231.
Unfortunately there is one aspect of UbuntuOne that still needs to be addressed before I feel that the product is really awesome. The speed of startup, scan and upload. Currently Ubuntu One will work extremely well for 500 files or so (the size does not actually matter much in this case). But if you start using it with 30k+ files then you will need to make your computer running 24/7 in order not to experience bugs LP:531273 and LP:436612.
However, this product is still in beta phase and most of the issues that were giving real bad experience in 1.0 version were actually fixed. I am now keeping my Documents in Ubuntu One UDF and this works pretty good. Not super-fast, though.
I am constantly poking developers about various issues I find (hopefully they are not thinking about kicking me from the channel yet) so I am well aware of the issues that still exist. It is a feature freeze now in Lucid so the development is slowed down, but I am aware of great plans for performance increase for Maverick Meerkat.
As always, feel free to come to #ubuntuone channel on FreeNode in case you need some help with ubuntuone. My nick is rye there and if you say “honk” I will magically appear in the channel :)