Leaky Unity in Oneiric
I monitored the top 5 processes showing the worst cumulative CPU time on my main desktop running Oneiric (32bit):
Results: 200MB leaked in less than 36 hours by compiz/unity with an unexpected CPU load even when totally idle for several hours in a row.
I initially wanted to track dbus-daemon sometimes taking a full core at 100% for several minutes several times a day, but it didn’t happen in this interval.
unity-service-panel seems to be leaking too, but not much in comparison. I’ll keep an eye on it.
I tried the same thing on another desktop, x64 this time, the leak is even worse, ~150MB in 12hours, and 7% CPU (it’s a quad-core @2.66GHz)
(compiz 1:0.9.4+bzr20110606-0ubuntu6, unity 4.2.0-0ubuntu4)
EDIT: Just upgraded to compiz 1:0.9.5.0-0ubuntu1 / unity 4.2.0-0ubuntu5, *DON’T*, it’s far worse. It crashed after 2h, and repeatedly froze at 100% cpu inside libgl (nvidia).
Experimenting with the Chromium-OS Web browser in Ubuntu
I’ve been wondering for quite a while if it would be possible to build and run the Web browser of the Chromium-OS in Ubuntu, and what it would take to achieve this. Also, I wanted to know what goods it could bring compared to the regular Chromium browser. So I just decided to give it a try. Read more…
Chromium 12 in Ubuntu
You should now be used to its fast release pace, so it’s probably not a surprise. Chromium 12 has just been released upstream less than 2 hours ago, 6 weeks after Chromium 11. Thanks to a good preparation with the Daily PPA and Dev and Beta Channels, I’ve been able to quickly ship this major Stable release to Ubuntu. While it’s making its way to the repositories, you can as usual grab it from the stable channel for Lucid, Maverick, Natty and Oneiric. Note that those using the beta channel received the same version a few hours ago.
Chromium 12 comes with a lot of new great features, including hardware accelerated 3D CSS and a new safe browsing protection system. Note that if you were using the Google Gears plugin, it’s no longer supported. For that, the HTML5 offline feature is preferred. This release also fixes more than a dozen of security issues.
If you use Unity, the Chromium Quicklist has been translated in 21 languages since the last update around 2 weeks ago.
Enjoy!
Chromium channels: bye-bye Hardy and Karmic
Following the official announcements of End of Life of Hardy Desktop (8.04) and Karmic (9.10) , and as previously mentioned in this blog, I just dropped support for those two distributions in the 4 Chromium channels/PPAs.
I could have decided to continue maintaining Chromium there, but with everything else unmaintained, it’s not wise to continue to pretend supporting a browser, which is the most exposed part of a desktop. To make the matter clear, I also dropped the binaries. Read more…
PPAs and distributions upgrades
It’s not new but in case you didn’t know, when you use the Update Manager to change your distribution, PPAs are disabled by the dist upgrade script and must be re-enabled manually.
This just happened with Natty on Apr 28. It’s visible on the Chromium Daily PPA stats:
..that’s why the Google Chrome deb ships a cron job to re-add the repository if it’s gone. In the past, I discarded the idea as too intrusive, but maybe I should reconsider doing the same with the 4 Ubuntu Channels, as it doesn’t make sense security-wise to keep a browser unupgraded.
Unity in Natty: update
2 months ago, I wrote about my experience with Unity in Natty. At that point, it was far from suiting my use-case, but yet, I somehow felt positive about its future and I kept using it. What was troubling me then was the release schedule. With all the remaining crashers and feature gaps 8 weeks before the long fixed release date, I had serious doubts about the final state of Unity in Natty. Now that it (Natty) has been released, and that developers spent a week at UDS and are now either taking some days off or writing blueprints, it’s a quiet period with almost nothing moving, a good time to see what has been achieved. Read more…
Chromium gets a quicklist in Unity
Just committed this to my main Chromium packaging branch, it will be in the next daily tomorrow.
..it will need translations.
Chromium and Unity
Chromium (trunk) recently improved its integration into Unity.
Some already noticed the download progress bar in the Unity launcher (the chromium icon in the side panel). But there’s more.
If you have “Experimental GNOME menu bar support” enabled in about:flags, you’ve probably noticed the global menu a few weeks ago. Read more…
How many Chromium users in Ubuntu?
As the Chromium maintainer for Ubuntu, I often wonder how many users installed the different packages I maintain. It’s obviously difficult, not to say impossible, to tell how many of those are active users, mostly because it would imply adding some ping back mechanism that would hurt the privacy of some of those users, a line I am not willing to cross. So to try to answer this question, I depend on publicly available data.
To start with, I need to see where users are taking their chromium packages from. Read more…
Chromium 11 in Ubuntu
Chromium 11 has been released earlier today. It’s full of good stuff for your own pleasure. It also contains a list of security fixes longer than my arm, for your own protection. Read more…
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