Revisiting Linux Part 1: A Look at Ubuntu 8.04
by Ryan Smith on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Test Setup
Since this first part is more about the applications and the user experience than the performance, we’re going to keep the benchmarks short. Along with looking at 9.04, part 2 will focus on a greater level of benchmarking, particularly graphics benchmarking.
For now we’re going to be taking a look at general situations – encoding, compression, file operations, etc. Because there’s a lack of a solid benchmarking suite that’s compatible with both Windows and Linux (e.g. PCMark), we don’t currently have a way to benchmark multitasking scenarios. So this is largely a look at single application performance.
Due to some initial issues with the 64bit version of Hardy, all of the following testing is done of the 32bit versions of Hardy and Windows Vista respectively. Future articles will be done with 64bit operating systems.
Our test setup was as follows:
| Software Test Bed | |
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Quad QX6850 (3.00GHz/1333MHz) |
| RAM | G.Skill DDR2-800 (2x2GB) |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-P35-DR3R (Intel P35) |
| System Platform Drivers | Intel 8.1.1.1012 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate 7200.11 500GB SATA |
| Video Cards | 1 x GeForce 8800GTX |
| Video Drivers | NV ForceWare 186.18 |
| Power Supply | OCZ GameXStream 700W |
| Desktop Resolution | 1600x1200 |
| Operating Systems | Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 32-Bit Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" |
| . | |
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LittleMic - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_linkWell, Windows 2000 had symbolic links for a long time :-p (only for directory until Vista though)
ekul - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
ntfs has symlinks but the windows shell can't create or manipulate them. Pretty pointless. MS can (and does) use them in vista/7 but you can't make your ownEeqmcsq - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
"hint: symlinks are your best friend. My home dir is littered with links to places on the filesystem I visit a lot to avoid a lot of clicking/typing"I use Gnome's bookmarks for that. Those bookmarks even include SMB shares on my other computers.
ekul - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
gnome bookmarks are very handy I just find symlinks to be more flexible since they work regardless of gnome vs kde, gtk vs qt and gui vs cli. Even wine can take advantage of themjigglywiggly - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
one more thing you should have covered is battery life on laptops. Linux in general is pretty awful at managing battery life. Just web browsing 4 hrs on Vista on my vostro 1310(not using 7) but with Ubuntu 2 1/2. It's a huge difference, but oh well.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
Laptops are out of our domain, that would be Jarred. If this two-part series is successful, I'll see what I can do about talking him in to putting some Ubuntu (or any Linux for that matter) battery benchmarks in. But I'm told a complete workup takes a while.strikeback03 - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
On my Thinkpad T43, battery life is essentially equal between XP and Ubuntu. Ubuntu may even be slightly better, though I have never bothered with a formal test to put real numbers on both. Have you looked at whether the processor is throttling down properly or not while in Ubuntu?sprockkets - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
"Now we have yet to touch on hardware accelerated playback, which is something we’re going to hold off on until we take a look at Ubuntu 9.04. Linux does not have a common media framework like Windows and Mac OS X have DirectShow/DXVA and QuickTime respectively. Rather the desktop environment that Ubuntu is based off of (GNOME) includes a lesser framework called GStreamer, which is closer to a basic collection of codecs and an interface to them. As such hardware accelerated playback is not as easy to do under Ubuntu as it is under Windows and Mac OS X. We’ll take look at the APIs and the software for this in our look at Ubuntu 9.04."Well, not exactly. There is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaAPI">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaAPI, which is not exactly widespread yet. nVidia's VDPAU, which provides hardware acceleration for h.264 and if you have the latest version of PureVideo in your card, it does VC-1 as well. It can work with this or alone as well.
Also, while it is wacky that bin or binaries are in one spot, and lib or libraries are in another, and anything you install is in a /usr/lib/local, it does keep all related files in one spot. Keeping all your libraries registered as packages also makes it easy to repair.
Also, one click installs are possible on openSuSE as well, though it does involve a small gui process and adding a repository as well. But doesn't any program require this?
Also, I believe your problem with SMB shares is something I run into as well, but only on GNOME. On KDE, browsing shares is quite normal. Since I never bother mounting the share, I can't directly access it without KDE caching the file locally.
Isn't /home/$Your Name$ intuitive as to where your stuff would be? That is very nice, as I can keep my stuff separate from the OS, thus I can reformat the OS partition without having to touch my data. Imagine reinstalling Windows and finding all your apps working exactly as before with no work. Can OSX do that (not rhetorical)?
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
VDPAU is something we'll specifically be covering in the Part 2; in fact it's what I'm working on at this moment.GeorgeH - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 - link
I'm sure the comment section will quickly be swamped with quibbles, so I just wanted to say that I found this article to be very informative, accurate (WRT my own Ubuntu experiences), and thorough. Kudos - now it's time to ask for a raise. :)