Ubuntu 9.04 RC Released

Mohamed Zaian writes "The Ubuntu team has released the release candidate for Ubuntu 9.04; 'The Ubuntu team is happy to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. This is their latest result, the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features.' The various other Ubuntu-derived distributions, like Kubuntu, have also had their RCs released."

Re:Anyone have a list?

[Dreadneck]

Ubuntu 9.04 Technical Overview [ubuntu.com]

Nice, but...

[DavidChristopher]

Remember, this is "pre-release" software.

Looks like there's lot of good stuff in there though - X.Org 1.6, Gnome 2.26, a kernel based on 2.6.28, ext4 support... (I'm especially interested in wacom hotplug tablet support in a mainstream distro


This won't be the year of the linux desktop- but we'll see how it goes on my laptop :)

Re:Anyone have a list?

[Aphoxema]

I haven't found a very comprehensive list, but I've been using the beta on my Wind for weeks. The focus seems to be mostly on free video drivers, migrating to ext4, and as always, polishing up usability. There's supposed to be some big improvement on boot time, but I haven't really noticed it. Maybe I'll have to reinstall from scratch after the final release to see it.

I want to see an LPIA LiveCD, but all there is is the alternative install. With the alt installer I can't access the USB stick I install from and I can't see my hard disk.

upgraded yesterday

[wizardforce]

So far so good, bootime looks good, speed seems reasonable. No problems with stability to speak of yet.

Re:Gotta upgrade to 8.10 first

[fractoid]

And that means rebooting.

Erm? Why is a reboot a problem?

He was making a 'joke', or humerous implication that as a Linux user, rebooting is both an extremely rare occurrence, and something inconvenient enough to avoid (which it generally is, if you have the option to avoid it).

Re:Gotta upgrade to 8.10 first

[seizurebattlerobot]

You are just being silly, right? Ubuntu 8.10 has had 5 kernel security updates in the 6 months since its release. Each one requires a reboot to be activated. Keeping a Linux installation secure requires frequent reboots.

I prefer running Linux instead of other operating systems, but I find it disheartening to read silly statements like this. Let Linux stand on its own merits; there is no need to lie on its behalf.

Here's that list in case you're curious:
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-751-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-715-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-679-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-662-1
http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-661-1

The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usage

[Pausanias]

I've been running 9.04 on my Dell laptop for a few weeks now. Like every new release, it's a mixed bag.
Pluses:

• Really, super, extra fast boot (10 seconds on my newish Dell)
• Fixes a lot of bugs (in GNOME mainly) from the previous release, Intrepid, which was their worst ever
• Includes the ext4 file system---having upgraded to ext4, I'm really noticing the performance upgrade.

Minuses:

• Evolution suckage continues. This version of the mail client crashed on me on startup, plus the "remove duplicate email" plugin no longer works with it. I've had it with Evolution. I've migrated to Thunderbird, and am vastly more happy. I continue to use Evolution's calendaring system, but only as a way to get my google calendar onto the GNOME panel.
• Broken NVIDIA binary blob drivers. Yet again. The intrepid drivers were OK, but now there's something toxic about the combination of either 173 or 180 and the Jaunty kernel. On 173 twinview locks up on me, and on 180 I get random hard lockups once a week. I have really had it with this nvidia binary blob garbage---I am anxiously awaiting some kind of dual monitor support in Nouveau, so I can ditch this piece of rubbish---a goblin that keeps on breaking Linux for many more people than just me, and always will, as long as the binary blob keeps on going.

Re:The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usag

[spasm]

The 'Lightning' add-on for Thunderbird lets you subscribe to multiple Google calendars & shows them as a sidebar to Thunderbird's mail window. Not quite the same as having it in Gnome panel, but I thought you might be curious to check it out if you weren't already aware of it.

Re:Anyone have a list?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed a large improvement in boot times with ext4 on my thinkpad x21 and compaq ev0 n610. The compaq has gone from 2+ minutes to approximately 1 minute, so smiles all round for jaunty from me.

Intel video drivers suck!

[MindlessAutomata]

Woe to anyone using an intel video card! Right now we're experiencing random lockups, and performance has generally been subpar for a lot of people. I'm not sure how stable UXA is yet, earlier it was causing a lot of lockups.

Seems pretty rough

[Radhruin]

I just upgraded, and I gotta say, it's been pretty painful.

• Had to reinstall sound drivers and get them working again (involves choosing a few settings here and there) and figure I need to restart to see any changes. Not the end of the world, but quite annoying, but then the fun began.
• My System menu lacks a "Quit" option (no kidding).
• During shutdown, my system speaker blared very quick (and LOUD) beeps during the entire shutdown process. When the final screen showed up, it changed to a constant tone for a couple seconds before dying away.
• Booting up is very slow as it pauses at one place for 10 or more seconds, then the load screen bails. It says something about an IO error. Eventually it boots normally.
• The monitor will not go to sleep. Instead the entire screen turns pure white. Thankfully the login box is there, you just can't see it, so it's possible to log in and clear the issue.

There's also been a million smaller gripes here and there, and this is only after an hour or so. Basically, the user experience could use a major amount of work in my estimation :(

Re:The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usag

[iammani]

Includes the ext4 file system---having upgraded to ext4, I'm really noticing the performance upgrade.

Be warned that the ext4 implementation in the RC is buggy. See Known Issues [ubuntu.com]. It is expected to be fixed in the final release. So, stay will ext3, and upgrade to ext4 once the final release comes out.

Re:upgraded yesterday

[Threni]

I'm still looking for a cd/dvd burning app which works. Neither brasero or that kde one (k3d or something) does the verify step - they just freeze. The disks seem ok, but that's not good enough so I'm currently burning (and verifying) in windows. It used to work, so it's not my hardware. I've raised a bug report but that's not helped.

Re:The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usag

[sakdoctor]

That's not what it said.

...is expected that a fix for this problem will be made available as a post-release update

Even the final release will be affected by this bug.

Re:Let's have some fun with this

[drinkypoo]

I used apt-p2p to upgrade to the beta a day or two ago. So far everything is great except that Ubuntu still hasn't figured out audio. I had to install Pulseaudio and follow PerfectSetup to get audio working. The nVidia 180.44 driver is working great for me, and your problem with it is almost guaranteed to be nVidia's fault.

Re:Ath5k wifi issues

[Anonymous Coward]

But updating to the RC and attempting to do large transfers still results in the occasional buffer corruption (invalid CRCs).

I've been running (K)ubuntu 9.04 on Aspire One since the Beta was released and applied latest updates daily over wifi using ath5k, but haven't noticed any corruptions in transfers. I'm kind of worried now though. Is there a launchpad bug report for the issue?

Re:Anyone have a list?

[jabithew]

I've recently installed the 9.04 beta fresh with ext4 and I haven't noticed an improvement in the bootime over 8.10, despite an upgrade from a Pentium D to Q6600.

Re:What about the audio...?

[mcelrath]

The current audio daemon being distributed by Ubuntu is pulseaudio. This has, for the last several releases, been a horrible pain in the ass. After the pain that was esd and artsd, I don't know why anyone decided to try another one. It appears the pulseaudio developers released an unfinished codebase into the world, and managed to get it into ubuntu. So for the last several releases (8.04 and 8.10 at least) audio has been a massive pain. Apps would crash, pulseaudio would crash, sound would not be present or wouldn't mix properly between apps. Flash video was particularly bad at taking down both firefox and pulseaudio. Skype was unusable.

However I must say that with 9.04 the situation is substantially better. (I upgraded to the Jaunty alpha specifically for the pulseaudio updates because 8.10 was unusable for certain combinations of audio-producing apps). I now reliably have music (rhythmbox) occasional browser noises (flash), wine games, video (vlc/miro/mplayer) and system sounds properly mixed with no crashing of the apps or the pulseaudio daemon. The pavucontrol control panel properly displays all the audio-producing apps and lets you individually mute them or control their volume.

A drawback to putting everything in userspace is that if your system becomes loaded or starts to swap, the audio will skip. Fortunately this doesn't cause any apps to crash, but is pretty annoying. It should be possible to eliminate this using real-time priorities, but I haven't investigated that yet. As far as I can tell there's no command line 'renice' program for realtime priorities. (I had one a long time ago, 'setrealtime' but it was a small piece of code I compiled myself)

So the summary is...the situation is better than it has been for several releases (more than a year, at least). But still worse than using the ALSA's built-in software mixing (which runs in kernel mode, I believe, and doesn't skip).

To answer your final question, I believe these daemons intercept calls before they get to the kernel. There is a library which can be LD_PRELOAD'ed which intercepts kernel calls (padsp). But since most apps these days are aware of two or more of {pulse, alsa, oss, esd, arts, jack}, configuring audio is rather a pain. All apps needed to be rewritten to take advantage of pulse. But at this point the important ones have (gnome apps) and some important ones that haven't (wine,skype) work.

The situation is improving, but ubuntu needs to configure realtime priorities for pulse by default, and we need to start killing off legacy sound daemons and interfaces. Linux audio is a mess.

Re:The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usag

[Zebedeu]

Even the final release will be affected by this bug.

I checked the page and it says:

When using the ext4 filesystem, accessing large files can trigger a kernel panic and filesystem corruption. The fix for this problem will be included in the final 9.04 release. Users installing from the Ubuntu 9.04 Release Candidate may wish to avoid this problem by using the default ext3 filesystem and converting it to ext4 after release.

Maybe that page changed meanwhile.

Re:Anyone have a list?

[drb_chimaera]

I did a clean install of the beta on my Eee 1000 over the weekend and have found the boot performance to be substantially improved.

Python, Pulseaudio and things

[Haiyadragon]

Python updated to 2.6.*, I've been waiting for that. Especially the backported Python 3 functionality is interesting; it'll also make porting to 3 easier.

Pulseaudio is still very buggy. It eats my CPU cycles, and I need those for several things, not just Pulseaudio. Removing it takes care of that issue as usual. I'll try again in six months. The same for KDE 4, I'll seriously try it when I don't run into several bugs before the desktop is completely loaded.

The new Nvidia drivers add support for vdpau, which means hardware video decoding for x264, VC-1 and WMV. It'll require you to compile Mplayer from SVN but if you're lucky enough to have a card that supports it, it's well worth it. The only method, that I know of, to run 1080p with decent quality and performance on Linux.

That, and this release actually seems stable. The last several final releases I waited a few weeks before upgrading, it seems that won't be necessary this time. Linux is really turning into a thing, it would appear.

Re:Seems pretty rough

[andy.ruddock]

The missing quit option is by design - look in the user-switcher menu. (I think it's stupid too.)

Re:What about the audio...?

[DaleGlass]

Look in /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, there are priority and realtime settings there.

Re:The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usag

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't go in for Schanedfreude but it is comforting to know that the Linux crowd is having Nvidia problems too. I live in FreeBSD land and intend to stay there (Netcraft will confirm it) and Nvidia "says" they "want" to make a native BSD driver but need some more of something from the BSD folks. I don't know what, and I don't know if they haven't given it to them, don't want them to have it or just don't have either the time or resources to do it right now. In any event it hasn't happened and I too have to run Linux binary blob drivers. They're really fine for my needs and they might be a damn sight better than that except I don't game and have only one monitor so I don't push the video layer that much.

Thanks for the word that it's not always sweetness and roses over there; sometimes it's discouraging not having the big developer base or all the press coverage and groupies and such, but I rarely have any issues with my small network so I'm not constantly reminded how far behind are my OS and its accoutrements. Nvidia blobs have made us brothers in suffering, yes? It will all work out though, it always does.

Good Luck,

Over Here

ATI restricted drivers no longer support X600

[zoward]

I'm running the Jaunty beta right now, and will probably regress to 8.10 soon because of the ATI drivers. The problem, AFAIK, is that the version of X.org 9.04 is shipping with will only support Catalyst 9.4 (currently in beta for linux). Catalyst 9.4 dropped support for a large number of older chipsets, basically anything earlier than R600, deferring to the always-improving open source ati drivers to support these. The open source driver is wonderful for 2D acceleration. It seems to handle all of the desktop effects with ease. The problem is that it's miles behind the fglrx (proprietary/Catalyst) drivers for 3D support. The reports I was able to scrounge online seem to indicate that open source ati 3D support is a good year away from general availability.

Re:What about the audio...?

[mcelrath]

It looks like it's also necessary to add a line to /etc/security/limits.conf otherwise you still won't be able to grab realtime priority.

Thanks! I'm running real-time now. Now to do something dumb and make it swap...or I'll just wait a couple days until firefox goes over 2GB memory usage. (yes!)

Re:Intel video drivers suck!

[ameyer17]

Well, I mean X/the kernel has been mostly stable, with a couple issues related to resuming from hibernation. PulseAudio's still a bit stability-challenged, though.