So twice a year I get excited about the latest Ubuntu release and it’s that time of year again. For the past three release cycles I have treated the Release Candidate as “good to go”.

Every release of Ubuntu impresses me in one way or another, but 9.04 is for me a landmark. While the changes are subtle, this is by far the biggest leap in terms of polished and presentable.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple major releases, and this is going to mess with your brain, when a new version of Ubuntu comes out you don’t have to go and buy new hardware to keep up. Quite the opposite. The old machine in your cupboard is MORE likely to be useful again with a new version of the operating system. Wild.

8:10 in October didn’t pack a massive punch for me. Sure, it was easy to install, worked really well out of the box with little grief, but so did 8.04 in April 2008 so no big wow factor there.

What makes 9.04 so different is how it feels like it’s all grown up. Here are the highlights:

Smooth Fonts

Ubuntu has never looked so good. Font smoothing is a very subtle thing. You don’t really see it unless it’s great. That’s why a web page looks better on a Mac - but now Ubuntu is right up there.

Boot time

This is being bounced around alot - and it’s pretty darn brisk. To give an idea of performance, from grub (linux starting to come to life after the machine has found itself) to login for me is 11 seconds! That translates to about 25 or so seconds to go from power on to completely ready to work when auto-login is enabled. That’s so so fast.

Performance: EXT4 File system and video rendering

There is a feeling of overall briskness that comes with Jaunty. It’s just quick. It feels quick. Two major components of that are support for EXT4 file systems and better video rendering. I don’t have metrics, but this baby just feels BRISK.

This is very useful.. just realized that I do so many repetitive things, eg:

cd config
ls -ltra

I thought, well I can just create a script like /usr/bin/cdl to do that, but that’s not going to work. Scripts are created in their OWN shell so you can’t use the “cd” command. It has no knowledge of the parent shell location.

So, the step is to create a function within the shell, and the easiest way to do that is create it in $HOME/.bashrc

Here’s the example above. The syntax is pretty standard and like shell scripting.

cdl()
{
cd ${1}
ls -ltra
}


Note you you have to open a new shell to see changes to bashrc

I’m not yer “Have laptop, am good to go” kind of guy so I have multiple systems, of which one is a laptop for travel.

How did I afford that attitude when I was a windows user, or how much would switching to a Mac cost me? Lots! As a business owner I never used pirated software and had a license for every instance of every install I had. Because of that I was an early adoptor of things like Open Office, even on the PC, because I wasn’t going to shell out for more than one instance of Office.

I have 5 systems.

• Primary home office Dual monitor Ubuntu Desktop
• Primary outside office Dual monitor Ubuntu Desktop
• Ubuntu box in the home theatre room
• Ubuntu Laptop
• Old G4 to sync my iPhone to

Total software costs in the last 2 years? I bought a sync tool for my Mac to do two way sync between the iPhone and Google Calendar - and if I wanted my USB webcam to work with iChat I’d have to spend some more - but that’s another story.

Focusing on the systems that I use day in, day out - nothing is what I pay, with no compromises. Kick ass, hardcore business systems with interface features I couldn’t get anywhere else. Wow.

How do you like them apples?

Where to start, er.. “Wow”. That’s where.

History

I bought this machine about a year ago and installed 32 bit Fiesty ( 7.04 ) on it, and man was it a pain in the butt! I didn’t help myself by choosing Xubuntu, which is I think part of the reason why I had so many power management issues.

Still, eventually I had a working system with Beryl and the eye candy I wanted, and didn’t even consider upgrading to Gutsy ( 7.10 ) based on the things I was reading in the forums.

I’m a bit older and wiser now, and I’ve had massive success with Hardy Heron beta on two dual monitor desktop setups, so as soon as 8.04RC came out, I couldn’t resist.

The install

First thing to note is that there was no need to change any boot preferences with 8.04. Previous versions needed some lapic / nolapic settings to be set to even get the live disk running, but no such troubles here. Threw in the disk and it worked.

I decided to trash my old install and reformatted the partitions. I do manual partitioning, giving 12gig to root, 4 to swap, and the rest to /home. This all went smoothly enough. No real suprises here. The only real change to install is that the timezone map is zoomable, and not to be a drag, but it’s pretty horrible!

Moving on. So, it installed no problem, rebooted no problem, but OF COURSE the wireless didn’t work.

Network connections and Broadcom Wireless

For a while I couldn’t get networking going AT ALL. I’d found issues with wired network with the beta, but thought it would have been fixed by the RC release.

Basically, if things look like they should work but don’t, open up a terminal and type:

sudo ifup eth0

that should wake up networking and have you good to go. Now for wireless… yikes.. this is never fun with Broadcom wireless cards. I fished around the forums and saw some strange things. Some people were seeing a restricted driver automatically coming up - I wasn’t. Others were finding easy solutions with the open source drivers ( that have “cutter” in the package name ). I tried a few things to no avail, got disheartened and went to bed.

After waking up, I searched some more and found this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=734003

and things started to make sense. I followed it, rebooted and.. uh nothing, so on to my secret weapon.. wicd.

wicd from http://wicd.sourceforge.net/ is a gem of a network manager and I’ve found it invaluable. This time last year I was pulling my hair out trying to get things working, and installed wicd and found that they WERE working - the built in network manager was just not getting the job done.

So, with wicd installed, I disconnected, grabbed a coffee and started sniffing around for other things.

Video Hardware

System > Administration > Hardware drivers informed me that I there was a restricted driver for my built in nvidia card. I enabled it, rebooted and had hardware acceleration. No sweat.

Screen Brightness

Leaving the confines of my dark basement office, and heading upstairs I notices that the screen was decidedly dull. Hmm. A bit of googling, and the solution I found was to right click on the top nav bar, select “Add to Panel” and add the “Power Manager Brightness Applet”.. Nice! A slider now controls screen brightness.

Suspend and Hibernate

OOooooh. It works! What else can I say. If you’re a mac user, you’ll wonder why this is exciting. If you’re a windows user you may have lost interest in whether things work or not, but in the world of Linux and Laptops, this is a biggy.

I’m having an issue with my network connection not coming back up, even though I have wicd configured to automatically connect to my network, but I can live with that compared to last years hit and miss disaster that was suspend and hibernate.

Flash

Now this is interesting.. that pretty much just works too. Unlike my experiences with the beta, I went to youtube, it told me I needed flash, I selected Adobe, followed my nose, and it installed and configured flash-nonfree for me without a hitch. That’s great!

Laptop buttons

Well they just work too. I have the basic play/pause, last/next, mute and volume buttons and they work. Awesome.

Creating a working environment

No real suprises here.. within 30 minutes I had the full compiz glory including cube, mysql & rails environment, thunderbird, avant window navigator and the rest. No issues here, and that’s very cool considering this is the AMD64 install.

Skype and the built in Ricoh camera

Boy was this a pain in the ass last year. Life is now slighly complicated by the need to get the 32 bit version of skype installed in my 64 bit environment. I used the tutorial here:

http://oligofren.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/skype-on-64-bit-ubuntu/

and it installed fine. OK, now time to fight with the camera.. uh.. wow. It just works. This time last year I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get the built in Ricoh camera drivers working, then I had strange usage issues that forced me to write a script to restart USB services every time I wanted to use it.. now it just works. I’m impressed.

Summary

Well, all I can say is that apart from the Broadcom driver, I’m blown away. I was expecting to fight this every step of the way and have been very pleasantly surprised. I’ve got about 3 hours time into this machine, of which 2 was the broadcom, and if you follow that link up there, you should have much less pain.

Kudos to the guys over at Ubuntu for hitting this one out of the park IMHO