Should I install Ubuntu 11.04?

[LarryJB]

I have been waiting for Ubuntu 11.04 to come out before starting my server build. But am beginning to wonder if that is the right decision. I guess the only reason I have been waiting is just so I can install the latest version. Would I be better off installing 10.04? Are there any big new features that 11.04 would give me over 10.04?
BTW: I am in no particular hurry to do this, in fact I probably won't find the free time until May or June to get started.

[Ian]

Hi LarryJB,

I always used to be one for having the "latest and greatest" version of anything. I think with Ubuntu tho it doesn't always make sense. For example, in terms of support, Ubuntu server 10.04 will be fully supported up until April 2015 whereas 11.04 will only be supported up until April 2012 (11.10 will be supported up until April 2013). So, if you go with the latest version now you'll need to be thinking about upgrading again this time next year. And again a year after that. If you stick with 10.04 then you'll avoid that need.

From what I can see there have been a few enhancements to the desktop on 11.04 but nothing to the "backend" part of Ubuntu that would give you anything over and above what you'd get with 10.04.

A while back I upgraded to 10.10 but soon went back after I discovered that using the UI you couldn't type the letter 'd' in a Terminal. The letter 'd' by default minimises all windows in 10.10. Not very helpful when "sudo" is a command that you'll need to type more than a few times!! Although that was easy to fix I then hit an issue where the sudo password was not being accepted. There was also a workaround/fix for that but I gave up and went back to 10.04.

Just my opinion of course

Ian.

[LarryJB]

Hmmm. This is sort of what I was thinking too. 10.04 seems to be a really good version. Being a sort of outsider in the Ubuntu world, my suspicion is that a new version every 6 months is almost too aggressive to "hit a home run" with every version released.
BTW: When do they decide that a version is worthy of the LTS label?

[Ian]

Hmm, good question. I'm not sure exactly how they decide on which version should get the LTS badge other than it seems to be every two years. They tend to back-port fixes into the LTS version which is something that doesn't happen with the interim versions as far as I know. The next LTS is slated for April 2012 and will be version 12.04.

I'm very happy with 10.04 and will probably not upgrade until support has ceased. Obviously I'll try out each of the interim releases (if nothing other than to convince myself to stay on 10.04 )

Ian.

[csenciboy]

I upgraded my headless server to 11.04 from 10.04 (server version) and it seems I got a whole bunch of packages that I didn't previously have. Now my 8GB SSD where the OS resides is almost full. Previously it was using less than 1GB. I'm not too familiar with what all the packages are for, and I've tried to research it, but have gotten confused. Is there an easy way to clean out the unneeded packages?

Background: I use the 8GB SSD for OS only. I have 2.5TB for media on separate HDD's. My Windows PC's access the media stored on this server via Samba. Also, I use the SSH package for Putty access, and I use TightVNC and Webmin for other admin functions...mostly the exact instructions provided on the original HTKH site. I mainly want this server to house my media (Samba), serve it to my PS3 (PS3MediaServer), and run Deluge or uTorrent with Flexget. Possibly, in the future, I would like to add KVM and some sort of automatic backup utility for my other PC's. That's all I'm looking for. Any way to slim down the package list?

[Ian]

Hi there,

Have a look in the "/var/cache/apt/archives" folder maybe all your diskspace is being used up there? You can clean things up by issuing the following command:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get clean

[helixhamin]

I actually installed with the 11.04.
The one thing I am getting lost on is why my VCN is closing my windows, or at least minimizing, when I use the d key on my keyboard...
I notice Ian mentioned this earlier, and wondering how to work around this issue, because it is really annoying trying to type in VCN with no D key....

Still starting, so guess I can redo the server, but hoping I can make due with this without redoing everything.

[Ian]

I actually installed with the 11.04.
The one thing I am getting lost on is why my VCN is closing my windows, or at least minimizing, when I use the d key on my keyboard...
I notice Ian mentioned this earlier, and wondering how to work around this issue, because it is really annoying trying to type in VCN with no D key....

Still starting, so guess I can redo the server, but hoping I can make due with this without redoing everything.

From within your VNC session click System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts and scroll down to Hide all normal windows and set focus to the desktop Click the D entry, and hit backspace to disable it.

[csenciboy]

When my server is sitting idle (to me) but I see in Webmin that there are 1500+ running processes, how can I determine which processes are necessary and which ones should be killed? Is this possibly a virus or some related type of hijacking of my system? If I plug a monitor into the server itself, I see a lot of lines of messages that process #XXXX was killed due to no memory remaining. They all list java as the process that was killed and the user (i think) as anon-rss...

for instance: [ 2093.999752] Killed process 25218 (java) total-vm: 1370904kB, anon-rss;63148kB, file=rss:0kB

any ideas on what this could be? It mostly came about after i upgraded to 11.04. Thanks in advance.