Ubuntu 9.10 Beta Karmic Koala quick review

[Solaris17]

Well as some of you may know the ubuntu beta 9.10 is out now i dont have the time to do a full review but from what i have seen so far.

Installation

Installation is relatively slow. The servers are very very taxed and it will take you a few hours easily to complete the upgrade. This is because i bealive resources are relatively un availible. Their are a few diffirent mirrors but the ubuntu update server (dist upgrade) is i bealive the only one availible given its beta status. Which unfortunately means that you and everyone else not upgrading from a disk are sharing 1 server that is hosting the OS throughout the world. However given what you think of this rea it might just be worth it to you. It has been for me.

Like i said installation can take some time but the upgrade itself is pretty painless...regardless of x32 or x64 the upgrade will be the same. All you need to do is press

Alt+F2

then in the "run" box type

update-manager -d

this will open your update manager. At which point you should see a distrobution upgrade being availible to you, this will say ubuntu 9.10. just hit update you will get a quick screen saying its beta and the usual warnings about bugs and not using it on an everyday machine. if you feel like taking this risk hit install enter your root password and let it fly.

First impressions

After you installation is complete you will find that ubuntu now has a diffirent boot screen. the screen is nothing special and includes a fog white ubuntu symbol and a ghost type loading bar



the login screen is diffirent from the known 9.04 login which is to be expected as these change with every ubuntu release. The login screen is a little less pretty than the 9.04 release but includes all of the same familier options.



the desktop itself is a tad diffirent you will notice some changes with the icons first. Some have changed but not enough to were you dont know what they are. if your the type of person who goes by icons instead of taking the time to read the menu. The rest have a higher resolution look about them. Clearer sharper better are the common terms to discribe them. After icons you will notice very subtle changes such as the windows being a darker shade of maroon and the scroll bars taking on the same color.



Moving past Cosmetics Is Easy

Moving past the cosmetics is easy because you realize the power behind the OS relatively quickly. One of the first things you will notice is that if you have restricted drivers installed you are picking up the hardware already. Thinks like Compiz and wireless are all set and ready to go with no further tweaking in most cases your already connected and ready to go. The next thing that should be noticable is that the install feels more responsive in simple tasks. Now everyone has always praised linux for its "fast feel" and doing some things other OS's do more quickly and 9.10 is no exception. opening a program starting F@H and even multi tasking with all the flash enabled seems faster and very fluid. Overall the performance is astounding expecially if you thought 9.04 was fast. The good part is with 9.10 being a little faster it might be more "old pc" friendly which ubuntu 9.04 wasnt really known or. Some users prefering 8.04 over 9.04 for their older machines. But with 9.10 almost ready to hit the shelves this might just be the excetion to the rule.

Beta means Bugs...where are they?

well while its a general rule of thumb that beta isnt usually the way to go 9.10 does a great job. I will post the official bugs below which already have a work around. However stress testing running old programs and multi tasking has already proved to be a breeze without the slightest bit of instability being detected. Like i have already said with proprietery drivers installed allowing compiz and other flashy effect and running wine for testing others the OS just keeps chugging. Now it is true that diffurent builds will yeild diffirent bugs and of course diffirent user experiences. However while i agree you shouldnt run any beta OS on a work or productivity machine. If you use linux as a email/web/folding or other mundane task type of machine 9.10 has proved so far to be incredably durable and upto the job.

Gah dist upgrades convenient or no?

Well you will be pleased to know that unlike previous upgrades you may have encountered the transition to 9.10 user wise is relatively harmless. Things like bookmarks and url history and even passwords are still their. Other things such as system settings regarding resolution and other various system settings like the pedgion or kopete logins are all still existent and ready to go. Which means that when booting into your brand new 9.10 install you should be all ready to get up and go with no problems.

Known Bugs in Ubuntu 9.10

As is to be expected at this stage of the release process, there are several known bugs that users are likely to run into with Ubuntu 9.10 Beta. We have documented them here for your convenience along with any known workarounds, so that you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

*

Some users with Intel video chipsets will experience a black screen on reboot after install because the fbcon module is not being loaded. As a workaround, users can boot with the i915.modeset=0 option. Investigation of this issue is ongoing. (431812)
*

If a RAID partitioning scheme is used during installation the grub boot loader will only be installed on the first hard drive instead of all the drives. Booting the system if the first drive has failed will not work. As a workaround users can manually install grub to each disk in the array using the grub-install command (427048).
*

Some users report that, in connection with the conversion of the base system to native upstart jobs, the system will fail to boot if the root partition has errors. As a workaround for this problem, users can boot from external media and run fsck manually. Investigation of this issue is ongoing. (432237)
*

A bug in the boot-time ordering of NFS-related init scripts will prevent systems from booting if any "core" filesystems (including /usr or /home) are mounted over NFS. Users with such configurations are advised to wait for the Ubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate before ugrading. (431248)
*

When performing an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud setup from the Server CD, Eucalyptus components fail to automatically register the components. To solve this, immediately upgrade to the latest Eucalyptus packages after installation, and sudo restart eucalyptus. (438602, 439251).
*

In the Ubuntu Moblin Remix developer preview, the sources.list in the live image and installed systems will miss the ~moblin PPA; you can add it manually for now (420048). Also, the web browser does not function correctly in the released image; a fix for this bug is available in the ~moblin PPA (439677).

for more info on this release and a chance to DL it head over here and read and soak bandwidth to your hearts content. Ubuntu 9.10

Honestly i give her a solid 8.9/10 which is amazing considering its beta. look forward to a full review upon final release.

[mab1376]

Nice work on the review.

How do you change the login screen user icons?

[Solaris17]

Originally Posted by mab1376

Nice work on the review.

How do you change the login screen user icons?

you should be able to do it in user accounts

[blobster21]

thx for the head up Solaris17

[Fox34]

Ok the first thing I noticed is "wow ubuntu has never looked so good" When it comes to *nix we all know we love the eye candy ha. It looks amazing. The bugs don't even seem to bad, they look like normal problems I'll have with completely released distros anyways. I guess we just gotta wait for it to be finished

[mab1376]

I installed the RC yesterday, and the smoothness of this OS is amazing. Everything is working flawless, I linked my Gmail in evolution with Imap, the IM client "empathy" is using Pidgin's libpurple but has been re-coded for seamless OS integration. My nvidia drivers installed with no issue and OpenGL is working great on Compiz and in Google Earth.

The only even slight bug I've noticed is during boot xsplash fails to load at the default resolution "1152x864" and reverts to "1024x768". Which might have to do with the nvidia drivers loading after the boot sequence instead of being integrated into the kernel like the Intel drivers now are.

[weatherguyto]

I have windows 7 RC & Ubuntu 9.10 installed a dual boot, on 750gb HD only.
When the Window 7 RC expires in March 2010 I need to replace
with Windows 7. The question is how do I get GRUB oot menu back?
I'm a novice to this If some could give step by step instruction
to reinstall the GRUB boot loader that would be appreciated.

The machine Dell Precision 690 4x HD, 12gb memory, 2 dual core xeon

Thanks so much,
Will

Please reply to ==>
wgill@optonline.net

[blobster21]

Originally Posted by weatherguyto

I'm a novice to this If some could give step by step instruction
to reinstall the GRUB boot loader that would be appreciated.

this is what you need to do :

How to restore the Ubuntu/XP/Vista/7 bootloader (Updated for Ubuntu 9.10)

[NinkobEi]

Ubuntu 9.10 is awesome. the whole Ubuntu Software Center has saved me so much freaking time. It's like an all-you-can-download buffet of free stuff. PSX/SNES emulators (that actually work!), firefox plugins, java, Dvd burning stuff..god everything. I wish windows had a similar feature...

[MN12BIRD]

I just installed it on some old moldy P4 with a separate NIC and yep... everything worked right off the fresh install. Sound, LAN and Video. Gotta love that!

[Kweku]

this makes me waana use my linux machine!