Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 17 April 2009, 5:19 PM
Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope' Release Candidate
The first, and probably most obvious, change is the improved boot speed. It boots in 30 seconds or less on all four of my laptops! Since this is now the Release Candidate, and the final release is less than a week away, I think it is safe to say that they are not likely to lose that boot speed because of other changes before the final release comes out. Hooray!
Of course, this release includes new versions of all sorts of packages, ranging from the Linux kernel itself (2.6.28), the Gnome desktop (2.26), X.org server (1.6), and various others. Two of my favorites, though, are improved handling of multiple monitors (I use this all the time with my laptop and an external display), and an updated openchrome driver, which makes installing it on the HP 2133 Mini-Note just about as easy and routine as it is on any other system (you don't have to download, compile and install the latest driver yourself).
Jaunty also includes full support for the ext4 filesystem. By full support, I mean that both the Linux kernel and the Grub boot loader understand ext4, so you can use ext4 for the entire installation. The general wisdom is that ext4 is faster and more reliable than the current standard ext3, and is a likely candidate to become the standard in the future.
The release notes also say there are changes which are more server-specific, such as integration with cloud computing, and an improved mail server. I have not had occasion to deal with those yet.
If you are really anxious, you can get the Release Candidate now. Those who are more patient might want to wait just one more week, as the final release is scheduled for next Thursday, 23 April.
jw 17/4/2008
PreviousComments on this post
I'd been waiting for someone to give some sort of review on this.
You mentioned you'd tried it on netbooks as well as laptops. Which ones?
I have personally loaded it on both of our HP 2133 Mini-Notes,
one with WXGA (1280x768) and one with WSVGA (1024x600). Both work very well with the standard distribution.
I have not yet tried the final release of the Netbook Remix, but I did try the daily builds a couple of times a week or two ago. The performance was unbelievably bad, so they must be doing something that is specifically tuned to Atom-based netbooks, which is killing the VIA/Chrome-based Mini-Note.
I've never tried the UNR on an Atom-based netbook, so I don't know what it is like when it works "properly". But it would have to be very, very good for me to consider using it instead of the standard distribution, because I find the standard to be absolutely wonderful on the Mini-Notes.
jw
I have the UNR installed on my Lenovo S10e and, apart from some woes that I posted about earlier today, it runs very nicely on an atom 1.6 Netbook. But I'm still using Ext3, see below.
What I would remind people is, that if you are installing using the new Ext4 file system on a computer that already has Grub installed, you must do the 'grub-install' command after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 in order to reinstall your boot loader, otherwise you can't boot the computer. Probably the source of all my woes because I didn't know about that.
In conclusion, I'm impressed with the performance of WinXP, Win7 and Ubuntu (UNR) on my Netbook.
My only significant reservation is the horribly slow speed at which images of the hard drive are created and restored to/from an external hard drive.
I think netbook remix uses openGL and openchrome is 2D only for the HP 2133. This is why Google Earth is also running very slow.
Aha! Very likely the correct explanation, I hadn't thought of that.
Thanks.
jw
