Released at the end of October, “Karmic Koala” is the latest release of Canonical’s hugely popular user-friendly Ubuntu flavor of Linux. I’ve been an avid Ubuntu user since 6.06. I’ve been a huge fan. It’s Linux, so I have the power of the command-line. I like to do things via command line when possible. I guess it just makes me feel like I’m more in control.
Last night I finally got around to getting 9.10 installed. Since I just started to learn Flex, I decided to go with the 32bit OS, since Flash’s 64bit Linux support isn’t that great. Flash 10 introduced Adobe Flash Player to the 64bit Linux Kernel, however its still just in Alpha. I also used the alternate “text” installer. This is the version to use if you want to get the install completed quicker, or set up an LVM. Also, thanks to my good buddy, Wikipedia, I learned that a LOT of users are experiencing problems when upgrading from 9.04. Good thing I chose to do a clean install. Typically, I won’t upgrade until the new release has been out for a while, but I wanted to do a review, so I decided to install from scratch. I’m glad I made that decision. I wasn’t thrilled with 9.04, however, so I couldn’t wait to try out 9.10.
Years ago, Mark Shuttleworth proclaimed that ["Pretty" is a feature]. Understanding the trend of the “wow” effect to impress users, Ubuntu comes “pretty” out of the box… unlike most Linux installs. Minus the added files and links on the taskbar, here is how mine looked, out-of-the-box:
After playing around for a while, I got things comfortable. Got to have those transparent terminals, people!
My favorite new feature is Ubuntu One. In a nutshell, it automagically ryncs the contents of my ~/Ubuntu One folder to Canonical’s cloud servers. For FREE, users are given a 2gb limit (and more can be purchased via monthly subscriptions). I can access my files anywhere via web-browser by logging into the interface. I’m still working on learning exactly how it works. But I picture using this feature almost daily. I’m working on figuring out how to sync my /var/www (apache ServerRoot) directory, so I can access my web projects from anywhere real-time. I could have set this up myself using on of my own domains, but this is way cooler. Once I’ve learned more about the system, I’ll probably dedicate a post to it. This seems like the type of service that can set Ubuntu apart from the crowd. It seems that the sync doesn’t follow symlinks, so I created a cronjob to locally rsync the contents of my /var/www folder to my /home/sean/Ubuntu\ One folder. One of my complaints, is the use of a directory name that requires escaping. This is one of my pet-peeves.. but for now it is the only folder that can be synced. I read in the plans, where it was mentioned that allowing the syncing of other folders would be good.. it even used /var/www as an example folder that people would like synced.
On a less exciting note, it seems the kernel version I’m using (Linux version 2.6.31-14-generic (buildd@rothera) (gcc version 4.4.1 (Ubuntu 4.4.1-4ubuntu8) ) #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:04:26 UTC 2009) seems to have brought back the troubles of Sleep/Hibernate in Linux. Every time I wake my laptop up (HP G60), I get one of these pretty icons in the top right of my screen:
How exciting! So I figure, lets see whats up.. I click on the icon, and thats when I discovered it. My least favorite new feature. A long-time staple in Redmond’s operating sytsems: the worthless error message:
I would at least like to know what process triggered the error!! But, I get it, Ubuntu is targeting users new to Linux, and providing them with that kind of information might be a bad idea.
I decided to report the error, just to see the process.. which eventually told me that it was indeed related to the sleep functionality. Here is the error from my syslog:
Nov 14 17:55:37 ubuntu kernel: [12229.569342] WARNING: at /build/buildd/linux-2.6.31/kernel/power/suspend_test.c:52 suspend_test_finish+0×80/0×90()
As far as load times, etc, I don’t really have much to report. The start-up time seems to have improved greatly, which is good.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the latest Ubuntu. Most things just worked after the install. I had to install the nonfree nvidia driver, not a big deal. On my old laptop, I was still using 8.04, which has been my favorite version. It also happens to be the most recent LTS (Long Term Support) release. Luckily, the next release, 10.04, scheduled for 04/2010, Lucid Lynx will be the next LTS release.
