Martin Notes

Tomorrow the beta of Ubuntu 9.04 should be released. The alphas have been great, so I’m really looking forward to the beta. I wonder if they got the last little hickups out of the alpha and will deliver the usual quality that we’re used to.

Actually I’ve had very little problems with the alpha so far. I run it as a dual boot next to my stable 8.10 and start it every now and then to play with it. I found so little bugs that I’m wondering if anything has changed since 8.10. But obviously it has, it’s much faster and runs so much smoother then 8.10.

The only real problem I’ve encountered was a total freeze at random moments. That sounds severe, but I’m sure this will be fixed in the final release. The hardware support is great, I didn’t have to tweak anything to make it work on my Sony Vaio TZ21MN.

There are a few challenges that are not directly linked to the 9.04 release. Compiz still doesn’t support a desktop larger then 2048×2048, annoying since I usually connect a second monitor to my machine which brings my desktop to a width of 3414 px. Too bad, but I can live with Metacity and it’s composite settings.

Entourage finally supports the MAPI connect to Exchange. A challenge is that at our company we’re using a SSL connection to get to Exchange, this makes sense but the latest release of the MAPI connector doesn’t support it. Shame, I would have loved to drop my Windows XP in a VirtualBox that only runs Outlook.

Ah well, I’ll wait a bit more until these issues are also fixed. Until then I’ll keep using the most stable, fast and feature rich operating system there is.

Ubuntu