News

New Artwork Lands in Ubuntu Karmic

Submitted by Andy on Fri, 09/25/2009 - 12:07

With a little over a month to go before the final release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) some of the much anticipated new artwork has landed. The new start up splash screen powered by xsplash looks exactly like the mock-ups and is a welcome change from the old usplash theme that was growing stagnant.

xsplash

The default desktop now uses the Humanity icon theme instead of Human which gives everything a refreshingly new feel and in a page taken directly from OS X and Windows 7 the notification area icons are now all uniform in color and theme which gives it a much more professional feel.

desktop

There are also a multitude of new desktop wallpapers that just showed up with today's updates.

wallpapers

All in all, it looks like when the Karmic Koala ships on October 29th it will be another great release from the team at Canonical and the Ubuntu community and this time some of the long overdue artwork should actually ship with the final.

New Interface for Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Submitted by Andy on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 10:03

After Updating my Dell Mini 9 to the alpha 3 release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala last night and running all the updates, I was treated to a completely new UI for netbook-launcher. It's still unstable, but personally I think its an improvement to the last version which is high praise considering I think the current UI of the Netbook Remix in 9.04 is the most usable netbook interface on the market today.

Netbook Remix Ubuntu 9.04:

Netbook Remix Ubuntu 9.10 alpha-3 (Aug 8th 2009)

Firefox 3.5 RC2 Linux vs Windows Performance

Submitted by Andy on Sat, 06/20/2009 - 11:15

With the release of Firefox 3.5 right around the corner and the inclusion of the new Tracemonkey javascript engine, I thought I'd do a quick javascript performance comparison between the Linux and Windows versions. The hardware specs for the test machine are: Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.00GHz 4 GB DDR2-667 Memory 320 GB Western Digital 5400 RPM Hard Drive The Operating Systems used for the test are: Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit Windows XP SP3 32-bit I used the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. Here are the results:

Firefox 3.5 RC2 Linux

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 2371.2ms +/- 5.0%
--------------------------------------------
3d: 323.0ms +/- 13.0%
cube: 89.4ms +/- 22.9%
morph: 83.8ms +/- 18.8%
raytrace: 149.8ms +/- 17.4%
access: 373.4ms +/- 7.9%
binary-trees: 104.6ms +/- 15.5%
fannkuch: 142.6ms +/- 10.3%
nbody: 93.0ms +/- 24.7%
nsieve: 33.2ms +/- 3.1%
bitops: 97.0ms +/- 9.7%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 3.6ms +/- 18.9%
bits-in-byte: 17.4ms +/- 31.0%
bitwise-and: 5.4ms +/- 12.6%
nsieve-bits: 70.6ms +/- 17.2%
controlflow: 80.8ms +/- 24.7%
recursive: 80.8ms +/- 24.7%
crypto: 156.4ms +/- 16.2%
aes: 91.6ms +/- 31.0%
md5: 41.6ms +/- 32.5%
sha1: 23.2ms +/- 30.6%
date: 315.4ms +/- 12.2%
format-tofte: 179.4ms +/- 8.1%
format-xparb: 136.0ms +/- 24.7%
math: 177.4ms +/- 11.0%
cordic: 98.2ms +/- 10.8%
partial-sums: 58.2ms +/- 23.1%
spectral-norm: 21.0ms +/- 29.9%
regexp: 132.6ms +/- 20.1%
dna: 132.6ms +/- 20.1%
string: 715.2ms +/- 3.4%
base64: 46.8ms +/- 32.0%
fasta: 166.0ms +/- 17.7%
tagcloud: 190.8ms +/- 8.2%
unpack-code: 216.0ms +/- 5.5%
validate-input: 95.6ms +/- 17.8%

Firefox 3.5 RC2 Windows

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 2076.4ms +/- 5.2%
--------------------------------------------
3d: 243.2ms +/- 8.9%
cube: 61.6ms +/- 20.1%
morph: 70.8ms +/- 7.8%
raytrace: 110.8ms +/- 15.5%
access: 249.6ms +/- 9.9%
binary-trees: 74.6ms +/- 28.1%
fannkuch: 99.0ms +/- 27.0%
nbody: 50.6ms +/- 15.2%
nsieve: 25.4ms +/- 28.7%
bitops: 74.2ms +/- 33.3%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 4.4ms +/- 92.9%
bits-in-byte: 16.6ms +/- 63.9%
bitwise-and: 4.2ms +/- 117.3%
nsieve-bits: 49.0ms +/- 34.1%
controlflow: 51.6ms +/- 12.1%
recursive: 51.6ms +/- 12.1%
crypto: 91.4ms +/- 12.9%
aes: 50.0ms +/- 11.4%
md5: 27.0ms +/- 21.4%
sha1: 14.4ms +/- 24.9%
date: 283.4ms +/- 10.0%
format-tofte: 131.0ms +/- 10.3%
format-xparb: 152.4ms +/- 14.6%
math: 86.6ms +/- 24.2%
cordic: 51.0ms +/- 43.0%
partial-sums: 25.0ms +/- 24.4%
spectral-norm: 10.6ms +/- 13.4%
regexp: 323.2ms +/- 13.2%
dna: 323.2ms +/- 13.2%
string: 673.2ms +/- 10.6%
base64: 33.2ms +/- 37.4%
fasta: 124.8ms +/- 15.5%
tagcloud: 202.0ms +/- 9.5%
unpack-code: 207.2ms +/- 16.6%
validate-input: 106.0ms +/- 36.4%

This is a dramatic boost from version 3.0.11 which clocked in with a total time of 4786.9ms on the version that ships with Ubuntu 9.04. However, the Windows version is faster than the Linux version which seems to be par for the course for Mozilla. Hopefully there will be more tweaking before the final release to bring the two versions closer in performance, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Maybe someday the Linux version of Firefox won't be treated as a second class citizen, especially considering it's by far the most popular browser on the platform.