Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Final Release
As well described in an article by David Meyer here on ZDNet UK, Canonical released Ubuntu 9.04, known as "Jaunty Jackalope" (as time goes by, I find myself less and less enamoured with the naming system...). The downloads became available yesterday afternoon, European time, and I have now installed it on all four of my laptop/netbook computers. I won't spend a lot of time rehashing what David has already said, so here are only the highlights from my personal experience and observations during and after installation of the final release:
- It's here, it's good, it works
- I have not installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), because it has serious performance problems with the openchrome driver in my HP Mini-Note netbooks. I'm perfectly happy with the standard Ubuntu desktop release on them anyway.
- Boot time has been cut in half on all four of my systems
- If you don't like the new 60-second delay before shutdown or reboot that has been introduced with this release, the option to disable it is lurking under "User Switcher Preferences" - right-click on the icon at the top right of the screen.
- I always make a fresh installation of a new release, I do NOT try to upgrade an existing installtion
- I have installed it using ext4 filesystems
- A number of drivers have been updated - most interesting to me is that it has the latest openchrome SVN version, so it works correctly on my HP 2133 Mini-Notes, without my having to download, compile and install those myself
- It includes a new notification system, which I doubt will be the highlight of anyone's day or the single reason that anyone may choose to upgrade, but it is a nice improvement
- Updated OpenOffice.org 3.0.1
- Updated X.org (including X server 1.6.0)
- Although the base distribution does not include the absolute latest Firefox (3.0.9), when the installation completes there is an update waiting to be installed which brings Firefox up to date
- My Kensington Bluetooth SlimBlade Mouse/Trackball works just fine, and once the pairing has been set up, it remains valid (and automatically works) across reboots and power cycles of both the computer and the mouse.
Here are a couple of notes about installation and use:
- During installation, if you have large disks with a lot of partitions, the disk layout window is likely to be much too large to fit on the screen. I initially thought that this was happening only on my HP Mini-Notes, but in fact it also happens on both Fujitsu laptops too. I suspect that if you have a small number of partitions this won't be a problem. If it happens you can get around it by choosing "Try Ubuntu without changes" from the LiveCD boot menu, then choose "Install" from the live desktop. When you get to the disk layout window, you can then move it back and forth by using Alt-Click-Drag.
- After installation, you might be surprised to find that "Screen Resolution" is missing from the System/Preferences menu. If you look carefully, you will find that it has been renamed to "Display".
- I am using dual displays (laptop and external) on both of my Fujitsu Lifebooks (one Intel 965 and one ATI Radeon Express 200M), and I have changed the Display setting to "not mirrored", so the desktop spans both displays, and it works great. The one with the ATI adapter doesn't even use the proprietary fglrx driver any more, it works just fine with the X.org radeon driver.
Summary: Good stuff from Canonical, once again.
jw 24/4/2009