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Recently installed ubuntu 12.10 to try it out.

Used firefox to try to youtube OOPS! No flash support.

Downloaded a mpeg 4 video and tried to watch it OOPS! No support for mpeg 4 video?

Noticed things were moving a little slow, I don't have the fastest computer, still a single core processor at 2.2GHz with 2 gigs of RAM.

I run top to take a peek at what's running and HOLY CRAP 164 tasks running using 96% of my RAM (firefox is open) not to mention 80 megs used in swap space?

Why? Why doesn't an operating system in version 12 support these basic things and run only the most necessary tasks at startup? This is not rocket surgery.

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closed as not a real question by Gilles, Jorge Castro, Eric Carvalho, heisenberg, hhlp Jan 23 at 11:17


2 Answers

Because Canonical wants to distribute all of Ubuntu as "free software," they can't bundle in software that isn't free (as in freedom). The software you cite, including the Flash player and MPEG4 codecs, are licensed in a proprietary format from their creators, and so they are incompatible with Ubuntu's overall licensing.

Fortunately, for those who want to use the admittedly convenient "restricted extras," they are easy to install right after Ubuntu: see The Ubuntu Restricted Formats Help Page.

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Flash and codecs

Adobe Flash and MPEG-4 codecs are not Free Software and may have some legal issues in some countries, so they are not installed by default, unless you click that checkbox on the installer.

Lighter alternatives

For a single core computer, you better go for a lighter Ubuntu variant like Lubuntu or Xubuntu. Single core, no hyperthreading CPUs are old. Yes, they are. No, seriously.

The RAM usage

Anyways, please make sure Ubuntu is actually actively using 96% of your RAM. If you run the command free -m, take a look at the second number on the second line, the one starting with -/+ buffers/cache. That's actually the free unused RAM. Ubuntu makes usage of otherwise unused RAM memory to cache i/o operations and recently opened programs, but it's not a true RAM usage.

About the 164 tasks

On my desktop, there's now 204 tasks as reported by top. However, 77 of them are actually kernel-space threads, not processes. As for the rest, please understand that:

  • Ubuntu is a multiuser, multitask, layered operative system. There are system daemons exposing interfaces to users via a intercommunication system, that must control the permissions: what users can and cannot do. So that's the reason because there's a lot of processes there, eating your RAM. But they're just sleeping. Not doing anything.

  • Most components are built upon the reuse premise. For that reason, most Ubuntu tasks must run several processes to achieve a goal.

For example, now I have 6 Network Manager related processes running, and that's only for managing the network:

  • 1 main process that does nothing, just forks launching what is needed.
  • 1 process to handle DHCP, because it's reusing dhclient.
  • 1 process to handle DNS, because it's reusing dnsmasq.
  • 1 process to handle the VPN connections, that basically put together all the neccessary options to launch...
  • 1 process to handle the opened VPN connection, since it's reusing openvpn.
  • 1 process to show the user interface, that icon on the top bar that reacts when I press on it.

From that 6 processes, no one is doing anything, they are slept. So, they won't eat your CPU, but they will probably ear your RAM.

Everything comes with a price, and on the software world, if you lower the RAM consumption, you put up the I/O and CPU consumption, and viceversa.

Of course, on a so complex task like Ubuntu does, manage all your computer enjoyment, there's a lot of room for improvement. The graphical architecture (Xorg, compiz, etc.) is too complex, and Unity probably launches too much daemons to provide search on-the-go but not-so-useful functionality.

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