If it bothers you that much, just switch to the Dark Looks theme. It's
window buttons are on the right.

Bothers me that the developers made left side buttons the default.
Easy to fix, but that's not the point. Standards are standards (well,
unless you are micro$oft)

There's something called HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that's supposed to set
up X without needing xorg.conf, unless you have unusual requirements. At least,
I don't have xorg.conf either and things seem to be okay.

HAL is gone as of 10.04.

As for the button decision, Mark Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu is NOT a
democracy. His words not mine.

Hmmm, that's an interesting attitude for an "open" architecture.
Oh well, whatever. As long as I have the option of making it "correct"
he can do whatever he wants - wait a minute! That sounds like the guys
in Redmond (except for the make it correct part)!

Why do people assume that because something is open source, that means
that absolutely anyone and everyone can dictate it's direction? Mark
Shuttleworth and his team develop ubuntu out in the open, but he does
have the final say. As the man who created and financed the distro, his
vote counts infinitely more than that of the random free downloader, and
should.

Nobody says you have to run ubuntu - you have complete freedom of choice
here, and can run fedora, suse, debian, slackware, or even build your
own distro if you don't like.

But I for one think the ubuntu management deserve the benefit of the
doubt. Comparing them to microsoft is a strange piece of logic.

OK, I'll play - what was the rationale for moving the buttons to the
left side of the screen?

I have no information on that - but I'm betting that Mr Shuttleworth has
his reasons.

The plan for moving the buttons to the left like on the Mac are to
open space on the right for a new feature to be added with Maverick
(10.10). They are being dubbed Windicators and they will change
depending on the application. On a text editor it will show whether
you have saved or not, on a file manager they may indicate disk usage,
on a file transfer application they may show percentage complete, etc.

Ubuntu is not content with the status quo. They want to be leaders and
innovators and usability is their focus. We saw a glimpse of this with
Lucid with the new theme and the MeMenu. These are just the beginning.
In Maverick they expect to have an improved sound applet and
notification area. As part of the notification improvements they want
to restrict applications from minimizing to the notification area.

Another factor in moving the buttons to the left was they are often
covered by notification popups. Personally I think that it is also
about moving as far away from Windows look as possible and we know
that Shuttleworth sees the Mac as the standard for usability and
Windows as the competition. It is all about being different and
offering an alternative.

I feel that GNOME users are in for a rough ride. As a group they do
not like change and GNOME 3 (which may or may not make it into 10.10)
has more change than many users will accept. KDE users have been
through this change and it was far from well received and they are
much more open than GNOME users. Ubuntu users will have a double
whammy, GNOME 3 plus Ubuntu's own changes.

The Ubuntu community will come to the rescue as always and there will
be solutions to every problem.. for the patient.

Thanks for the explanation - now that I know what they are called I can
read in more depth. Prevailing opinion seems to be "wait and see" with
large amounts of skepticism thrown in for good measure. For me, making
a major change like this based on the rationale that "is is not like
Windows 3.1" is fallacy. Making a change to give netbook users more
screen space, likewise. But, I will also wait-and-see and hope that (a)
it can be turned off, and (b) will the implementation be consistent
throughout the environment, user applications, video drivers (like ATI,
for instance).

Right now, the fish I am frying are bigger than this - like getting
10.04 to work at all.

What is wrong with 10.04 on your system?

I am trying to build 10.04 on an i386/2.5GHz box that has been running
Debian for years. I really like the look and feel of 10.04 so decided
to go that way.

Issues:
Downloaded the desktop iso, burn the cd, boot. All I get on the screen
is two small icons centered in the bottom. Nothing else happens most of
the time. Sometimes if I hit <CR> at just the right time, I get the
language screen and can then proceed to the main menu. From here the
install option does nothing. A little disk activity initially, then it
just stops. Dead.

So - try the alternate iso. Download, burn, boot - it seems to run all
the way through the install. But - the system will not boot. A bit of
disk activity then nothing. Ever. Grrrrr. Menu options presented are
2.6.32-21. Recovery mode will not boot either.

FYI - I have also tried loading 9.10 (which loads just fine) and then
updating to 10.04. The results are similar. There are two options
presented on the boot menu (sorry for not taking notes here but I think
the main option was 32-22 and the alternate was 32-21), the first one
does not work at all, the second gives a bunch of errors and then the
system comes up. It looks current.

I have checked the BIOS and it is current. Not sure what else to do
other than revert back to Debian which I'd rather not do.


I have tried the "repair" mode, thinking I may have a grub issue, but
grub only installs on /dev/sda. I get errors on sda1, etc.

Ubuntu 10.04 shipped with some bad ISO that were released on the release
date, but corrected a few days later. This ISO botched grub2 among other
things. Make sure that you have a updated ISO first.

When I have installation problems the first thing that I do is boot into
text mode. To do that press F6 at the grub screen and remove --quiet splash.
Now you can see text scroll by and see where the loading fails. Next you can
try so boot parameters to work around the problem. Common problems are
graphics problems and kernel panics, usually caused by a conflict due to a
memory or IRQ conflict, or a weird BIOS setting etc.

Ubuntu 10.04 made many changes that could lead to problems. Graphics cards
were a problem for many. Old drivers did not work and the open source ones
they used to replace them did not do the trick with Plymouth (also new with
this release). Also HAL is gone and Devicekit is in, so that may be a
problem area.

The boots (both normal and rescue mode) die just after "run_scripts
/scripts/init-bottom" which completes. Looking at init, it is trying to
do some filesystem work next:
"Move virtual filesystems over to the real filesystem"
it attempts a couple of mounts, does some housekeeping, then fires off
the console.
I can't see anything strange here but system startup is not my expertise.

FYI: my iso was downloaded yesterday so I assume it is good.

I'm not sure where to go next - I have managed to build one good 10.04
system on different hardware.
I am using it in place of the system I really want to use <sigh> I am
not going to spend a whole lot of time on this (already have) so unless
there is some magic, it's back to Debian on that box.

On my 8 year old ECS iBuddie4, which I'm typing on, I could not get
either Kubuntu or Ubuntu, both Lucid, to install. I tried Xubuntu and
much to my surprise it installed and worked perfectly.

Since I really wanted Kubuntu I thought I'd try to install
Kubuntu-destop from the repositories and much to my surprise and
delight it installed without a hitch and works perfectly. I may remove
some of the remnants of Xubuntu, but they really aren't that many or
in the way.

Interesting idea and I will pursue it. Unfortunately, I have a Debian
build going on on that system now and don't want to bail out on it.
This system is my development server for web and other development
projects so it cannot be down for very long. Already coming up on 48
hours. I do have another crash-n-burn system that I will put Xbuntu on
one of these days.