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Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Now In Beta
An anonymous reader writes "To little fanfare and not much news coverage, Canonical released the beta of Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope.' I tried it on a Dell Mini 9 using the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) and it's fabulous! Much better than the sad 'Dell Desktop' that it shipped with. Finally, someone has broken the 25+ year old too-many-open-windows-and-chaos desktop paradigm with UNR's task oriented layout, which is perfect for small netbook screen sizes."
That's why there's not much fanfare.
It's for people willing to experience a few issues, or a few bugs, to make the product which comes out with lots of fanfare more solid.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
What the heck is a Jackalope?
I've been running it on my two EEE's for a long time. That interface is the bees knees for those things. That was distributed on the UbuntuEEE fork that later turned in to EasyPeasy. I'm really interested in trying out 9.04 though.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Here are some screenshots for Alpha 6, but does anybody have screenshots of Beta?
Not that they will be all that different.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
a rabbit with antlers.
spinochet
Users of Intel video chipsets have reported performance regressions in Ubuntu 8.10 compared with previous releases. (252094) Although these performance issues have not been resolved by default in Ubuntu 9.04, a new experimental acceleration architecture option, DRI2/UXA, is available for Intel graphics users. Our testing has found this provides significant performance improvements for many users, but has also shown risk of severe stability problems, thus we are not yet providing to the general public. You can opt-in to enable this by running "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf", and adding Option "AccelMethod" "UXA" to the Device section of your xorg.conf. Users wishing to maximize stability should stay with the standard default acceleration method, "EXA".
I thought they "fixed" the brown desktop theme?
These are screenshots of the Alpha version. From my past experience Alpha releases do not change the default theme from that of the previous release. When I set up an Intrepid Alpha system it just used Hardy's desktop. When it upgraded itself to Beta the theme changed to some sort of generic polkadot wallpaper with everything else kept the same. When it went into full release the theme changed to the real Intrepid one.
Wait another month, and by then you'll certainly have your new colour scheme.
Find out more here:
http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr
Selected quotes:
"Ubuntu Netbook Remix is optimised to run on a new category of affordable Internet-centric devices called netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment."
Wonder what that last bit means? It flashes 'buy me now!!!! 50% discount!!!' on the screen?
"A remix is a 'respun' version of Ubuntu built for a specific purpose. Although Canonical has encouraged community projects to use this terminology for some time, this is the first time that Canonical has used it. We are using it to differentiate from an 'Edition' which we consider a complete version with daily builds suitable for the average user with no additional work beyond installing the CD."
"All of the initial Ubuntu Netbook remixes combine optimisations from the Moblin project for Intel® Atomâ processors and it is specially designed for netbooks. Intel and Canonical are working to create a new computing experience across a rapidly expanding category of portable devices."
Wintel is dead, long live Buntel?
Kubuntu with KDE 4.2.1 looks fabulous too! Just installed Kubuntu Beta and KDE is totally sweet in this release. There is even a native KDE4 Network Manager that looks great and works well.
The Plasma widgets remain a bit crashy and buggy - Comic Strip won't take the configure button off even after Strips are added, Moving widgets crashes Plasma etc.
But yeah, getting there. By KDE 4.3 release things ought to be totally rocking.
Try it out people - you won't be disappointed.
Ubuntu ships with an RDP client.
Anyone know of a remote desktop solution for Ubuntu that can connect to a Windows 2k or newer box?
Yes. Ubuntu. RDP works out of the box--I use it nearly daily. Applications->Internet->Terminal Server Client. There's also an panel applet front end if you'd prefer that--very handy if you have several Winboxes you need to connect to on a regular basis.
Pidgin will be replaced by Empathy in future releases. It's still needs some work, but looks promising - it's very modular and integrates nicely with the rest of GNOME. It has video chat support.
I installed this a month ago almost by painstakingly finding the i386 iso of Jaunty and installing the netbook remix stuff independently.
I've got a eee 900 with the 16GB SSDHD and let me tell you: this thing boots and runs quick! I've tried XP and the UNR Ibex version and the Jaunty build using ext4 filing system blows everything else out of the water with all variations of start-up times. There are problems, however, with certain aspects of the remix.
There is significant lag issues with the interface itself. I believe this may have something to do with the size of my swap partition, but thus far I've been too lazy to format or change anything since the partial upgrade a few days ago.
Its only the remix that reacts slow, everything else is fast, fast, fast! ext4 certainly adds something to boot times and it looks like this Ubuntu build will really be one, coupled with netbooks, that can somewhat pierce the Microsoft stronghold on the general public....eh, probably not.
I thought they'd change the brown in 9.10, Karmic Koala. Shuttleworths announcement of KK: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2009-February/000536.html
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Maybe this will be more use, then.
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+milestone/ubuntu-9.04-beta
It wasn't really difficult for me to find it, starting from the page whose link I posted...
about three click and twelve seconds, all told.
And if that is still not good enough, then I suggest you go back to whatever you usually do when you don't get everything spoon-fed to you.
K.
Worst haiku ever.
He's talking about the RPM monopoly :)
Or not. The quote says "we are creeping towards $30 million" and that this would make Canonical "self-sustaining", for regular updates, which is their current model of very little development and a lot of marketing.
So, yeh, it's possible that "creeping towards" does actually mean "really close to, and getting closer every day" and not just "going from 1 to 2 million this year". But I bet against that, personally.
And who is paying that $30 mil, is it desktop people ... or self supporting server users like the French govt. / Wikipedia. My guess is that any money is coming from the later.
So at the end of the creep towards $30 mil, what do you get? Still not enough money to fund actual development (feel free to log bugs and RFEs at bugzilla.redhat.com), and a focus on servers instead of the desktop for what little work they do (because that's who is paying).
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
"Finally, someone has broken the 25+ year old too-many-open-windows-and-chaos desktop paradigm with UNR's task oriented layout."
Umm... tiling window managers have been around longer than non-tiling ones. You can blame apple for making windows overlappable. The 'task-oriented layout' is nothing new or innovative - see wmii, awesome, xmonad, dwm, etc. etc. (even fluxbox, with its 'tabs', actually) for examples of modern X11 window managers that offer similar functionality, plus much more...
Personally, I started using wmii a few months back and haven't looked back since.