Ubuntu 9.04 released
Just received and email by way of the Tayside LUG saying that the new version of Ubuntu, 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope), has just been officially released. The Ubuntu site is very slow so I’m guessing that it is true. Thankfully I upgraded to the release candidate earlier this week so I don’t have to deal with slow package downloads.
Just a heads up to the Ubuntu users out there.
Intrepid Ibex
Ubuntu 8.10 codenamed Intrepid Ibex was released yesterday. DIligently, I launched the update manager to begin the update process. As usual, a ton of stuff to download. Mostly happened without a hitch.
Flash player was the hitch. Took over 2 hours to download 3.8mb. That is pretty bad. Once it was finally installed, all was good. Upgrading a running system is always gonna be interesting. Things change before you. Like Firefox. I launched it and found that it looked shinier than it used to. Some of the panels had a glossy effect to them. Not sure if it is a theme but it looks good. A yellow bar appeared suggesting that I find out about my rights by clicking on the button. That launches a new tab with the url of about:rights which basically says you can modify and redistribute the firefox code but not the icons. Another bar appeared a while after asking me to restart firefox due to some other upgrades which is a nice feature.
Gnome, in my chosen theme, looks pretty shiny as well. Nautilus has tabs! That is awesome. No more multiple windows!
Transmission (bittorrent client) has also had a polish. The web interface is no longer a seperate addon but is built in which could be useful for folk wanting to check up on their downloads from elsewhere.
I do have a criticism of Transmission though. There is no tray icon to minimise to. I have to keep the main window up to download which is not a good thing. Not sure if it is a bug or not. Thats about the only bad thing I have found so far.
Pidgin has also been improved a bit. Has support for the Live Messenger personal message things. Still no webcam support.
One of the new features is a usb stick creator which allows you (as the name says) to create a bootable pendrive with ubuntu on it. Aparrently lets you store documents and whatnot on it, might be useful. Wonder if it will let you use non ubuntu isos.
Overall, the upgrade has been good. Not had a proper poke around yet but nothing major has broken.
In case you were wondering…
…My new laptop has arrived in one peice. No problems at all. The carrier at the end of the day was UkMail, thankfully not a shady white van.
Laptop is bigger than I expected but thats probably due to my crap estimation of size. Everything just works, webcam, wifi, sound, even the media buttons that are at the top of the keyboard. The Ubuntu folk have done a great job with this.
Copying over my documents and settings was a breeze, just select all the files and folders I want (remembering the hidden files), copy and paste then reboot once all the patching was done. Easy as pie.
This was definatly a good choice of laptop.