Ubuntu 9.04, what’s new?
Ubuntu 9.04 has been released yesterday and of course I installed it immediately. I’ve been running the 9.04 release since the alphas, but the Ubuntu tradition is that the release is much better then the pre-releases.
Installation
For the installation I decided to use a separate boot partition which should make it more easy to have multiple systems on my laptop. I’ve tried this two times, but sadly this resulted in a kernel panic telling me something about a failed synchronization. So I skipped the boot partition setup and installed the boot files on the system partition. That worked just fine.
The installation itself is smooth and easy to understand. The most improved part is the timezone selection, that works fine now opposed to the crappy version in 8.10.
Updates
After installation I did my usual updates:
- Gnome-DO
- Restricted extras
- Microsoft fonts
- VirtualBox
- Compiz Config Settings Manager
- Skype
- Global Menu
- Removed the idiotic lower Gnome panel
All of those worked fine, for some of them I had to update the software sources, but that was no problem.
Then I went into my usual tweaking: themes. I’m now running the Dust theme which is delivered with Ubuntu these days. It’s a nice quiet theme that requires little screenspace.
NTP
After the visual stuff had been taken care of I ended up with a problem I always had with Ubuntu: installing the NTP time service. Somehow I never can get it to work from the Time and Date admin panel. It always crashes for a while and after a couple of tries it works. A strange bug that has been around for a while now.
Up and running
Now the system is working and all my stuff is installed again (1.5 hours after starting the install), I’m playing with it. It’s fast, the ext4 filesystem seems to make the system more responsive. Starting OpenOffice’s word processor takes a while the first time, but it’s lightning fast the second. Everything in the system feels snappy and robust.
On the functional level nothing really changed from 8.10. The system is nearly the same as 8.10. Of course OpenOffice has been updated to 3.0, but I had that version running on 8.10 for ages already. Brasero has been added, nice, but I don’t burn CDs anymore. When I look at the work I do with my laptop the 9.04 is exactly the same as 8.10.
The new boot splash and the notifications are nice, but they are not a major upgrade. They add to the overall robust feel of the system, however.
Evolution and Exchange 2007
My personal frustration, using Evolution with Exchange 2007, still hasn’t been solved. You can install the evolution-mape package from synaptic now, but it doesn’t work for me. The configuration is sloppy and difficult to understand and from what I’ve read it still doesn’t provide all functionality. That means that I’m still required to run Windows XP in VirtualBox. Too bad.
Conclusion
I knew that 9.04 was not going to be a major step forward. Ubuntu has always taken a evolutionary approach to their development. The system is faster and more stable then 8.10, but it’s not a major step. I must admit that I expect a bigger improvement from being able to use Chrome on Linux then from upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10.
So, what’s new? Nothing much really. Stuff has been changed under the hood, but the end user will not really notice that. It’s still a stable and modern system, but I think some real inovation would really help to make Ubuntu more widely used.
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