Right now we’re all happy with our Jaunty Jackalope, but we need to keep looking forward. The release of Karmic Koala (9.10) is scheduled for October this year. It’s planned to have the following features:
An interesting release to look forward to.
Check the release schedule at Ubuntu.
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.
There is a repository that contains the daily build of Chromium. It’s easy to add: no building required! For details you can look at the PPA page.
The only thing that took me some time was the PGP file. I’ve created a file for your convenience.
Open Software Sources and add the key in the authentication tab. Then add the following to the Third Party Software tab. Click close and reload.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
The browser is FAST, but it’s not 100% stable. You can play with it, but at this moment it won’t replace Firefox.
The people from Gnome Global Menu have made their installation more convenient then it was before. No more compilation required, just add the repo to your software sources.
Gnome Global Menu gives you a menu bar for the active application in a gnome panel like Mac OS X has it. This saves you some vertical screen space since the menu is removed from the application window.
It works fine, but only for GTK applications. That doesn’t sound so bad, but my main applications, firefox and openoffice, are not genuine GTK applications. This means that their menu is still shown in the application window itself. Too bad.
A clear description of the installation is on the project install page. The only flaw on there is that you need to import the GPG key before you reload the repository list.
After the installation you need to add the global menu applet toyour gnome panel and right click it to open the preferences. There you can enable the global menu.
The alpha 5 of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope has been released. I’ve installed it on my Sony TZ laptop for a little test drive.
Downloading went very smooth, it looks like Canonical has added some servers for the alpha downloads. When I started the live CD it worked as we’re used to. From the boot I went straight into to the installation. I read that there were some issues with the partitioner, but it gave me no problems at all.
Booting into the freshly installed Ubuntu I was confronted with a layout which is very similar to 8.10. I found the 
only visible difference after connecting to the wireless network: the new notification system. It shows nice, half transparent, notifications in the upper right corner of the screen. Strangely they fall over the top Gnome panel, I couldn’t find out if that is meant to be or a bug. A little alpha bug: the contents of the notification window showed a couple of times and then died. When I change the volume or the brightness I only see a black filled rectangle.
There are hardly any changes in the preferences panels. But the system itself works great. It boots fast, works very smooth when started. Compiz performs good, nothing special, but that’s good enough. This release feels like an update of the ‘bottom’ of the system: everything works smooth and fast, but there are no obvious changes.
Overall I’m looking forward to April when the final will be released.
The name for Ubuntu 9.10 has been revealed: Karmic Koala.Now, I’m fond of koalas, but what kind of name is that? Ah well, Ubuntu holds its ‘weird name’ status.
CNET has published a nice article on Mozilla’s Bespin: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10163516-2.html?part=rss
There have been a number of posts about Gnome Do 0.8 already, but I’ve been late with installing… I must say: it’s brilliant! They’ve combined the normal Do GUI with a dock and that works just great.
The dock works as a dock should: it’s at the bottom of your screen and it shown applications that you can open, or have open. The settings for the dock can be changed by right cliking on the most left icon (summon Gnome Do). There you can change settings like auto hide and whether you want a Mac like zoom in the dock. Adding applications is easy: just drag an icon from the Gnome menu to the dock.
The good thing is that Gnome Do hasn’t lost it’s command line. When you press the keyboard shortcut (Super-Space) or select the “Summon Gnome Do” icon the dock changes into a typing area as you know it from Gnome Do.
To install just update your Software Sources with the following:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-testers/ubuntu intrepid main
If you have Gnome Do already installed then you’ll get an update notification pretty soon. If you hot not then you should do the following:
sudo apt-get install gnome-do
To enable the dock you have to select the Docky theme in the appearance preferences.
If you are never satisfied with the amount of settings they are offered: You can find Gnome-Do in the Gnome Configuration Editor at the following path:
/apps/gnome-do/preferences
In the Docky folder you can edit some settings like the IconSize, the monitor where it’s shown and the SummonTime.
You can download and build it like I described in my previous post.
wget http://google-gadgets-for-linux.googlecode.com/files/google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.5.tar.bz2
sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev libmozjs-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libltdl3-dev libxt-dev libxul-dev libgtk2.0-dev librsvg2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
To start Google Gadgets:
ggl-gtk
I’ve installed the Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope alpha 3 on my normal laptop, I didn’t try anything like VirtualBox since I wanted to see how it performs compared to my normal Intrepid install. So I downloaded the iso, burned the CD, shrank my 8.10 system partition and installed 9.04-3.
Installation
The partition shrinking and installation ran as smooth as possible: No reboots required until the install is complete and no useless questions. Resizing the partition took a while, but after that the installer finished within 15 minutes. I was rather surprised that I had so little problems since it’s an alpha release, maybe that’s because the installer is not under development yet.
First impression
Booting 9.04 is fast. I’ve used the new ext4 filesystem and that’s worth it: My full startup from power on until password entry is about 40 seconds, from there until the KDE desktop is working is about 20 seconds. For comparison: my current 8.10 Gnome takes 60 seconds until password entry and then 40 seconds until a working Gnome desktop. That’s a good start for the rabbit.
The KDE 4.2 is now a release candidate, but I think it still requies quite some work. Although I must admit that my knowledge of KDE is limited, maybe some of the stuff I found is normal in KDE.
First of all my laptop screen is 1366 pixels wide and that’s too much for KDM. The screen where it requests the password leaves a space on the left and right of the monitor where is shows garbage, the middle 1024 (I guess) pixels are rendered correctly. I’ve seen this problem before: KDE 4 doesn’t like widescreen resolutions.
Visuals
After logging in it uses the full width of the screen and I was confronted with the beautiful KDE4 plasma desktop. A small glitch: the KDE panel was too small for the screen, but that was easily fixed. The screenshot shows the desktop after I played around with it for a while. I really like it, the plasmoids work smoothly and integrate with the desktop instead of, like screenlets and Google gadgets, which are windows. The design can be easily adapted to your wishes, but the default design is already very good.
The panel takes a bit getting used to when you get here from Gnome. It behaves like a crossing between the Windows taskbar and a Gnome panel. It has a Vista start menu like feature in the lower left corner, the windows list in the middle and the notification tray and clock on the right. When you right click the panel you can configure the height and width, and some other settings. Here also: everything looks nice and smooth.
Then I opened my first window. How can they deliver such a beautiful desktop with such a horrible windows and widget (or style in KDE speak) manager? The windows don’t fit in the slick and smooth plasma desktop at all. They stand out like somebody drew a stick figure on the Nachtwacht. I tried other styles and window decorators, but they never fit within the plasma desktop.
So I started looking for a style that did fit in, kde-looks should provide a solution there, shouldn’t it? Indeed there are some quite good looking styles and decorators there. So I downloaded , but how to get this into KDE? There is no “Get” or “Import” button with the styles and windows. Which is strange since there is one for colors, plasma styles, etc. Google helped: you need to build them! I won’t bother you with the trouble I had getting the QtCurve style to build, but it takes some skill and time. The result was disappointing. It looks like the KDE 4 desktop still needs to update their style and windows rendering since the current one limits designers way too much. Even Gnome offer more (!)
Functional
The desktop feels good, everything responds well and most of the buttons are in logical places. The working and categorization of the KDE menu takes some getting used to, but I guess that’s just time. One thing that does annoy me is that there a so many ways of configuring stuff and there are so many configurations that it hard to find what you need. For example: Konqueror downloads to the Documents folder by default. I don’t like that, I prefer a separate Downloads folder. So I set of to change that. There are a lot of configuration entries in the Konqueror menu, and each display a load of options, but mine wasn’t there.
There more in that direction: how do I switch off the tap-click of my touchpad? I really had to search to switch of the system sounds, and when I found them I had to switch them off for each action one by one. Why does KWallet ask me for my password each time I login? These are not essential things, but they shouldn’t be present in an OS in 2009.
Kubuntu comes with OpenOffice 3 comes pre-installed and works as expected, so do the address book and the organizer. Gimp is not there since it’s very Gnome. Amarok showed some problems, or: it’s not there. That’s an alpha bug, I guess. The pre-installed applications offer sufficient functionality to start working without immediately starting Adept. When you need to install anything, Adept helps you and finishes the installation nicely: I installed Skype and that didn’t give any problems.
What I found surprising is that I couldn’t find Firefox in Adept. Actually I expected it to be pre-installed, but when it wasn’t I expected it to be easily installable. I hope this is an alpha bug because Konqueror is nice, but I can’t live without FIrefox.
Overall the KDE 4.2 and the underlying Kubuntu is working nicely. There are very little bugs and nearly everything runs smooth and with problems. Of course there are things that require some attention: changing the icon set doesn’t work and scrolling is sometimes a bit jumpy. Although these don’t break the usability of the system. It’s stable, fast and modern.
Conclusion
Aside from the usual alpha problems the Kubuntu 9.04 alpha 3 is pretty good. I might even become a KDE fan when they fix the visual problems with the styles and windows. The best feature so far is the speed of the system, it boots faster and feels much more responsive then 8.10. I’m looking forward to the release.
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