Ubuntu 17.10

[Dirk Broer]

Ubuntu 17.10 is out and I am presently about to start a 3rd machine with it.
Is it that good? Both yes and no.

New: no more 'Dash' in the left upper corner, but something likewise in the left lower corner and default close/minimize/maximize at right upper corner. As if some windose developer has been busy...but it works.

In 16.04 the GPU part of an APU got automatically detected, it was just that the OpenCL support stopped at 1.1
In 17.10 the GPU part of an APU does not automatically get detected, unless you work with the latest greatest RX cards -or a R7 at minimum.
When you manually install the OpenCL you need you are -when you use older AMD video hardware like me- in the land of 1024x768, a serious throw-back.
Oh yes: for older hardware OpenCL 1.1 is still the limit, even when it is recognized as capable of doing OpenCL 1.2...
And using Xrandr is no solution, because the legacy X.Org made place for Wayland (and no, I do not get the option to boot into X.Org at startup).

The BOINC-Integer MIPS in the new BOINC-client (4.8.3 Linux-x86) under the new kernel have reached sky-high values, to the point that they are virtually useless to compare them with older Linux BOINC clients or contemporary Windows clients

AMD Athlon 5350 (Socket AM1), running Ubuntu 16.04, BOINC-client 7.6.31:

di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | Benchmark results:
di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | Number of CPUs: 4
di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | 2444 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
di 28 nov 2017 02:14:22 CET | | 8932 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

updated this system to Ubuntu 17.10, BOINC-client 7.8.3:

Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | Benchmark results:
Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | Number of CPUs: 4
Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | 2343 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
Tue 28 Nov 2017 10:01:31 PM CET | | 56329 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

We'll soon find out where those MIPS are good for....

In short: the flight forward, in the hope that 17.10 would solve the problems 16.04 had, proved futile -but we're on the bleeding edge of progress once again, FWIW.

[KarmannGaz]

I seem to remember seeing somewhere that Ubuntu 17 killed off fglrx support, rendering older GPU cards useless. I'm leaving my HD6670 based machine on Mint 17.3 (which is basically Ubuntu 16). Upgrading Linux systems is never easy. :(

[Dirk Broer]

Ubuntu 16.04 already did away with FGLRX, which is why I upgraded to 17.10 in the first place.
I had hoped that the Open Source drivers for the 17.10 release would have been better -as in supporting a broader range of cards, crunching-wise- ,
but the opposite was the case. In the case of APUs you're f***ed, in the case of discrete cards: just upgrade to a supported type.
Luckily my 6670s run under Mint 17.3 that still can crunch Collatz, at least. (But no Seti, Seti Beta, Prime Grid, Enigma, etc.)

[Dirk Broer]

Ubuntu 16.04 already did away with FGLRX, which is why I upgraded to 17.10 in the first place.
I had hoped that the Open Source drivers for the 17.10 release would have been better -as in supporting a broader range of cards, crunching-wise- ,
but the opposite was the case. In the case of APUs you're f***ed, in the case of discrete cards: just upgrade to a supported type.
Luckily my 6670s run under Mint 17.3 that still can crunch Collatz, at least. (But no Seti, Seti Beta, Prime Grid, Enigma, etc.)

Update:
The option of Wayland or X.org presents itself at boot up now, but choosing X.org does not solve my problems.
The present Bristol Ridge APUs should give no problems as their IGP is a R7, we'll soon find out.
My Linux Mint appears to be at 18.3 and the last software update did away with the crunching support for the HD 6670s (LLVM is 4.0 and should be 5.0, amongst others) Gone are the easy Collatz credits....
The Open Source Radeon driver for Ubuntu 17.10 is at LLVM 5.0, but still has problems with crunching Seti.

Breaking news: Collatz [that will not run on Mint 18.3/Ubuntu 16.04] will run on Ubuntu 17.10 as the needed LLVM 5.0 is now there. It is just that the R3 of the Athlon 5350 is veeerrrrryyy slow running it.
Put in my HD 7790 -whose Bonaire chip is of the same generation as the internal R3- and my problems were solved: Collatz is running again. May even re-enable the R3 for other projects than Collatz.

[drezha]

I installed a copy the other day in to a VM and I was surprised at how much I liked Gnome 3. When I'd tried it previously on Debian, I'd been disappointed, but I was happy with this version.

I run Windows 10 on my main machine, but I use more and more open source software on it that it makes sense to use Linux (not for games quite yet mind). Maybe I'll give it another go, but I wouldn't mind waiting until it hits LTS.