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Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released
palegray.net writes "The latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released. Offering numerous enhancements for both desktop and server environments, this release includes notable features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubuntu One 'personal cloud,' and Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Please be sure to use a release mirror close to your geographic location to help reduce the stress on Ubuntu's primary servers; using BitTorrent for downloads can help alleviate the load even more. If your organization has adequate network and server resources, please consider hosting a mirror as well."
The new Ubuntu seems to have a lot of new stuff that I feel slightly uneasy about. I'm not sure if Ext4 has proven itself yet (then again, I haven't been paying attention), and grub2 isn't even available on Gentoo yet (my somewhat crude stick of measuring when things are considered "new" or not). I like the progress, I'm just interesting in hearing some discussion about it (hal deprecation, new input system, NX, AppArmor, etc).
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
I have to think those reviews were written by people wearing the rosiest of rose tinged glasses. I mean I'm a die-hard Windows user myself but I did try the Ubuntu 9.10 beta on one of my older laptops and it ran like a dream on the 192 MB of RAM it had in it. On the other hand, Windows 7 on my Acer Aspire One netbook with 1 GB or RAM seemed to run well at first but after a few days, the sluggishness showed through. Little delays here and there and the Aero effects stuttering just started driving me up the wall. I just went on and put XP back on it though, I'm very seriously considering putting Ubuntu on it now. I can't believe it but I finally think Linux might be ready. That beta on my old Toshiba with the 600 MHz Celeron certainly made a believer out of this Windows user.
My experience with 9.10 so far has been extremely positive.
I did an upgrade at first, and then a complete reinstall. The upgrade process went very quickly, and I only had one problem - that my network card became "unmanaged" again. This is some remnant from my 8.10 install back in the day. Besides that, there were no problems and my desktop was exactly as I left it.
The install process from scratch also went well. The partition manager is pretty friendly, and the (I think) new time zone selector is actually easy to use. I also don't need to do a whole bunch of stuff to determine my keyboard layout -- it defaulted to US english and that was that.
The desktop system itself is much improved. The changes to Nautilus are welcome. The side bar is more user friendly, and the folders and such look a lot better.
The notification system has some improvements so it's not quite as useless -- multiple consecutive notifications from the same application drop into the same notification window, and there's a sort of glass effect when you "mouse under" the window, making that absurd behavior a bit more palatable.
My graphics card (GTX 280) was supported after downloading some binary drivers (although I had to restart to enable full desktop effects).
My sound card (X-Fi Fatality edition) is finally supported in kernel, although I had to use amixer in order to get my mic working. The new sound mixer, though, is FAR more user friendly.
I've had no problems so far with EXT4, and my load times in Heroes of Newerth have decreased since the upgrade.
The font rendering. It's much better across the board. Firefox sees the biggest improvement, likely due to the upgrade to 3.5. Font rendering used to be far worse than Windows and is now on par with Mac (I prefer the bolder, smoother look of Mac fonts, personally).
The HDD diagnosis tool is also handy. As soon as the upgrade completed and the tool ran, it warned me of some SMART errors on one of my drives. It's pretty easy to dig into the drives and run diagnostics and such.
Empathy is still bad, and I switched back to pidgin after a few minutes of use. For example, I had to find an hidden check box just to "enable" the account and get it to connect. The UI is also not so hot.
Overall I haven't regretted the upgrade at all, which is more than I can say to 9.04.
Let me introduce you to Slackware. Slackware requires:
* 486 processor
* 64MB RAM (1GB+ suggested)
* About 5GB+ of hard disk space for a full install
* CD or DVD drive (if not bootable, then a bootable USB flash stick or PXE server/network card)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.