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 24 April 2009, 9:18 AM
Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Final Release
- It's here, it's good, it works
- I have not installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), because it has serious performance problems with the openchrome driver in my HP Mini-Note netbooks. I'm perfectly happy with the standard Ubuntu desktop release on them anyway.
- Boot time has been cut in half on all four of my systems
- If you don't like the new 60-second delay before shutdown or reboot that has been introduced with this release, the option to disable it is lurking under "User Switcher Preferences" - right-click on the icon at the top right of the screen.
- I always make a fresh installation of a new release, I do NOT try to upgrade an existing installtion
- I have installed it using ext4 filesystems
- A number of drivers have been updated - most interesting to me is that it has the latest openchrome SVN version, so it works correctly on my HP 2133 Mini-Notes, without my having to download, compile and install those myself
- It includes a new notification system, which I doubt will be the highlight of anyone's day or the single reason that anyone may choose to upgrade, but it is a nice improvement
- Updated OpenOffice.org 3.0.1
- Updated X.org (including X server 1.6.0)
- Although the base distribution does not include the absolute latest Firefox (3.0.9), when the installation completes there is an update waiting to be installed which brings Firefox up to date
- My Kensington Bluetooth SlimBlade Mouse/Trackball works just fine, and once the pairing has been set up, it remains valid (and automatically works) across reboots and power cycles of both the computer and the mouse.
Here are a couple of notes about installation and use:
- During installation, if you have large disks with a lot of partitions, the disk layout window is likely to be much too large to fit on the screen. I initially thought that this was happening only on my HP Mini-Notes, but in fact it also happens on both Fujitsu laptops too. I suspect that if you have a small number of partitions this won't be a problem. If it happens you can get around it by choosing "Try Ubuntu without changes" from the LiveCD boot menu, then choose "Install" from the live desktop. When you get to the disk layout window, you can then move it back and forth by using Alt-Click-Drag.
- After installation, you might be surprised to find that "Screen Resolution" is missing from the System/Preferences menu. If you look carefully, you will find that it has been renamed to "Display".
- I am using dual displays (laptop and external) on both of my Fujitsu Lifebooks (one Intel 965 and one ATI Radeon Express 200M), and I have changed the Display setting to "not mirrored", so the desktop spans both displays, and it works great. The one with the ATI adapter doesn't even use the proprietary fglrx driver any more, it works just fine with the X.org radeon driver.
Summary: Good stuff from Canonical, once again.
jw 24/4/2009
PreviousComments on this post
What was your experience with Grub when you used EXT4. Ubuntu says to reinstall it. Did you do that?
I had problems with being locked out of my computer when I used Ext4, with Windows XP and Windows 7 already installed and booted by Grub previously installed using Ext3.
I like the naming system.
Animal + silly adjective means no false positives when trying to search for news items in Google Alert
Moley, I had read your posts about having problems with GRUB, and I had been thinking about it. That was part of the reason that I specifically mentioned that I made a clean install, not an upgrade; during the installation I let it install GRUB.
I haven't had any problems with the Ubuntu 9.04 GRUB and ext4 at all. However, almost all of the "older" versions of GRUB don't understand ext4 at all, so they simply can't boot from it. So on my multi-boot laptops, if I have GRUB from one of the other distributions installed, I can't boot the Ubuntu ext4 partition. The only exception that I have found to this is that the GRUB in openSuSE 11.1 does understand ext4. That's a bit odd, since the openSuSE 11.1 kernel doesn't understand ext4. Strange.
Anyway, my experience has been that it either works or it doesn't. If you can boot it once, it should always boot, and if it doesn't boot the first time, it never will. I can't figure why it might be intermittent, or might boot once or twice and then lock you out.
jw
A word of caution before replacing the current EXT3 filing system with EXT4 (and a good reason not to). There are currently very few backup programs which support backing up EXT4 partitions. Clonezilla being one.
http://clonezilla.org/
Acronis True Image 2009 works perfectly backing up an NTFS/EXT3 dual boot system (and it seems to now only backup the data part of EXT3 Partitions making it faster, rather than the old sector-by-sector method). It even keeps Boot loaders intact on restore too / imaging.
I'd personally would not choose EXT4 for a good while yet - until a decent backup program is compatible.
"- I always make a fresh installation of a new release, I do NOT try to upgrade an existing installtion"
ah, I was going to ask you about this if you hadn't specifically mentioned it!
I DL'd the ISO yesterday, but will probably wait until the weekend (or possibly later, depending on coursework submissions) before I have a go at installing it.
judging by the comments/blogs so far, JJ is sounding pretty good! not least the bootup times...
a quick question: I've been wanting to set linux up on a USB stick, so's I can run the live version on pretty much any machine (especially as I want to convince the wife to migrate, but her netbook has no CD drive). wondered if anyone here has been doing this already & what (if any) problems I might encounter along the way...
If you are considering only Ubuntu releases, this is now quite easy, and I have done it a number of times - for example, this is how I have tried out UNR (Netbook Remix) several times. In the Ubuntu System / Administration menu, on 8.10 you will find "Create a USB Startup Disk", and on 9.04 it is called "USB Startup Disk Creator". That is a utility which will read an Ubuntu iso file (yes, apparently it checks something - I've tried to feed it other iso files and it doesn't like them), and create a bootable USB device or SD Memory Card. There is really nothing to it, you just point it at the file to read and the device to write, and it takes about a minute. Of course, your target system has to have a BIOS which allows you to boot from whatever device you create - my HP Mini-Notes will boot from either USB or SD, the Lifebook S6510 will boot from USB but not SD, and the Lifebook S2110 won't boot from either. You may have to go into the BIOS setup once to enable boot selection from the device.
The Ubuntu utility creates the bootable system within a FAT32 partition on the USB/SD device. If there is one there already, and it has sufficient free space, the utility will just use it; if there is none (i.e. when I tried to "trick" it into using an ext partition), it will insist on creating and formatting a FAT32 partition first. The point is, if your USB/SD device is large enough you can create a 700MB or so FAT32 partition for the boot image, and then create one or more other partitions, of any type, which you can mount manually after booting. This is a good way to keep your own data safe when you are updating the boot partition, for example with Ubuntu daily builds.
A few of the other Linux distributions are now available as img files which can then be blasted onto a USB/SD device with dd, but I don't recall offhand which ones. I have limited experience with them, and one thing I wondered about at the time but didn't follow up investigating, was that they specifically say you have to target the dd at the base device (/dev/sdb) rather than a partition on it (/dev/sdb1 or whatever), which implies that it is writing the partition table as well as the boot partition; I don't know if this means you can't subsequently add your own partitions as I mentioned above, but I suppose you could.
jw 28/4/2009
thanks , jw. i had actually forgotten about the netbook remix version of ubuntu jj *blush*!
thankfully, ubuntu are very clear with their instructions on how to create a bootable USB of UNR, so saturday morning was spent mostly DL'ing the .img file (not very long as it happens) and then creating the USB bootdisk.
the same afternoon was spent introducing the wife & UNR to each other - they hit it off quite nicely, and could soon become inseperable!
not bad, considering she's a bit of a technophobe & took the best part of a year to learn how to change the channels on the TV!!!
Azonei - that is quite interesting. I'll be very interested in hearing how your wife gets on with UNR, I've been wondering if it would be right on netbooks for some novices here. I have looked at it briefly on my HP Mini-Note, but besides the fact that the performance is intolerable (the "fault" for that is with the Mini-Note and its VIA Chrome 9 display chip), I found it to be rather cluttered and off-putting. The fault for that, however, may well be with me being too old and narrow-minded.
jw
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