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Operating Systems Software Linux

Ubuntu 9.04 Released 620

Mohamed Zaian writes "Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition is free to download from Thursday 23 April. Also announced were the simultaneous releases of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix (UNR). Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition delivers a range of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. Enhanced suspend-and-resume features also give users more time between charges along with immediate access after hibernation. Intelligent switching between Wi-Fi and 3G environments has been broadened to support more wireless devices and 3G cards, resulting in a smoother experience for most users."
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Ubuntu 9.04 Released

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  • Jaunty (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday April 23, 2009 @10:15AM (#27686899) Homepage Journal

    Jaunty Jackalope may be the poofiest name for an Ubuntu release yet, but this is the first one since the Dapper Drake (Also quite poofish) to actually improve Ubuntu's stability. Unfortunately GNOME has boned the network manager (well, we got this one in Intrepid, it was extremely nonintuitive then and it's the same now, and it's still too retarded to handle bridging) and the gnome-panel which is now a mandatory application. Also the logout panel is now stupid, you can have logout options or shutdown options but you can't have both at once. Let's all hear it for Ubuntu for making the system more stable, and let's all give GNOME a big raspberry for their constant attempts to take GUIs into the last century. (KDE still looks like the kitchen sink exploded on my desktop... but anyway.) I do have one gripe, though: Will you guys please decide on a strategy for audio? I'm getting tired of having to follow PulseAudio's PerfectSetup document, why don't y'all try reading it sometime? Not that pulseaudio came with Jaunty; too bad audio didn't work right without it.

  • by BayaWeaver ( 1048744 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @10:18AM (#27686951)
    Can it boot persistently from the SD of my Eee PC 900 and will the wifi just work out of the box? Have never been able to get any of the earlier releases to do these two things.
  • by senorpoco ( 1396603 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @10:27AM (#27687083)
    I installed the release candidate last week, and it lasted for all of 25 minutes before it ate my desktop. I love being on the bleeding edge, but it doesn't make life easier or more productive, just more interesting.
  • by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @10:39AM (#27687247)
    Get your torrents at http://torrent.ubuntu.com:6969/ [ubuntu.com]

    Is there a torrent anywhere of the netbook remix? I'm downloading that from Canonical UK at the moment and it's not exactly quick. There seem to be torrents for every other release, but not that one. Oversight?

  • by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:03AM (#27687617)

    I've been using Linux on integrated Intel chipsets since the i810 driver came out and I have no complaints.

    I had no complaints with the i810, the i815, the i915, the G33, or the G45 that I currently use. There was one Ubuntu release where the resolution setting didn't match the documentation, so I had to enter some manual stuff into xorg.conf, but before and since then, things have been gravy.

    A lot of these bugs look like they're for things that I can't give good marks to -any- drivers, like switching displays on laptops, enabling compositing on ancient chips (really?! why bother!) and other foolishness.

    Really, Intel doesn't make great 3D graphics chips, everyone knows that. If you actually want fast 3D, pick someone who fabs hardware that can handle it. The Intel -drivers- on the other hand, are hands-down the most supported and functional open-source drivers that I've used.

    Intel not only releases the specs for their hardware, they sponsor the development of the drivers in a totally open-source-friendly way.

    If you have complaints about 3D in Linux on integrated Intel graphics chipsets, you'll probably have the same complaints about 3D in Windows on Integrated Intel chipsets. Intel isn't in the mid-to-high-end market, they make excellent 2D chipsets that do 3D 'well enough' for casual non-gaming use.

  • by DiegoBravo ( 324012 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:04AM (#27687631) Journal

    At least in my country and LATAM in general, I think the Server Edition only could thrive if Oracle Server can be certified at some time. As each day pass on, this looks more difficult.

    In general, I fail to understand the Canonical offering of Ubuntu Server compared to CentOS/RedHat Servers (or even Suse).

  • Re:Obligitory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Random BedHead Ed ( 602081 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:13AM (#27687793) Homepage Journal

    Annoyed as I've been at the incompleteness of the various distros' KDE offerings lately, I will dutifully try each release, including Jaunty, if only to see whether anything is horribly broken, and whether I can reliably work with a KDE 4 desktop.

    Last time a Kubuntu came out they broke metadata, at least for JPEG images, so all the photos I manipulated in the shiny new Gwenview lost their dates, orientations, and so on. Not the end of the world, but it was an annoying bug.

    I'm endlessly impressed by KDE's efforts, but the distros totally jumped the gun on the new architecture. The community (even most people in this crowd) totally grokked the idea of "4.0-as-API-freeze" but the distros throught 4.0 meant time to upgrade, and frankly they should have kept 3.5 as the default until the 4 series was truly ready. But again, I'll try it out. Amarok 2 is supposed to be a fantastic music player.

  • Re:Jaunty (Score:2, Interesting)

    by xiong.chiamiov ( 871823 ) <xiong DOT chiamiov AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:20AM (#27687915)
    Kubuntu's the worst KDE distro I've ever experienced, btw. Not that I like how KDE is right now (still waiting for right-click on desktop to produce applications menu, and transparent bar without having to retheme), but 4.2's pretty polished in the distros that don't crap it up.
  • Re:Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by not already in use ( 972294 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:23AM (#27687963)
    The funny thing is, once you step outside the bubble that is slashdot, people are generally happy with Vista. I run Vista at home and work, and considering how often I reboot, it could take 5 minutes and I wouldn't care. The boot time issues and other Vista issues is greatly exasperated here on slashdot, in almost equal proportion that which Linux shortcomings are overlooked.
  • by denominateur ( 194939 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:27AM (#27688023)

    I agree with you that this issue seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the release engineers, who pushed the 2.6 driver through despite its downfalls. (apparently to gain support for some newer chipsets, which could've been simply backported by adding PCI ID's to the 2.4 driver)

    Compositing and 3D performance are horrid and even non-composited 2D is slow when EXA is used. Apparently, if you're lucky you can switch to UXA, but it is non-functional on my systems. (G35: no modes found & i915: DRI disabled)

    The issue can be improved (but not fixed) by using a backport of the version 2.4 intel driver available from the "http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu" PPA of siretart. This provides minor performance enhancements but is still slower than intrepid.

  • by muckracer ( 1204794 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:29AM (#27688057)

    > Love the encrypted home folder option.

    Haven't tried it yet. Is the login pass phrase also unlocking your encrypted home dir? If so, isn't it annoying to type the 128-bit pass phrase in every ten minutes your desktop screen saver lock kicks in? Any workarounds (separate pass phrases for home dir and login/desktop lock)?

  • Re:Notifications (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ian Alexander ( 997430 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:41AM (#27688255)
    If you open up the menu editor there should be a hidden preferences applet in there that lets you configure the notifications. I found it on my system which I installed fresh from Beta.
  • Re:Jaunty (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeBabcock ( 65886 ) <mtb-slashdot@mikebabcock.ca> on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:44AM (#27688305) Homepage Journal

    I'm a power-user and a developer. I use the command-line for anything requiring *real* using of my computer. You can't beat command-lines with piping and scripting for *real* power-use, period.

    For my GUI usage, I use Gnome because it looks nice and works well by default. There are certain KDE applications I use because they are better designed than their Gnome counterparts or have been around longer and have better functionality (Kopete and Amarok come to mind), but my desktop is Gnome with several Eterm windows running at any time.

  • Re:Notifications (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oxy the moron ( 770724 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @11:59AM (#27688545)

    Beware if you have an older ATI card you might run into problems.

    "Older," in this case, defined as anything prior to the HD3x00 series. My experience with 9.04 and a 2600XT is less than ideal.

  • Re:Jaunty (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @12:24PM (#27689041) Journal

    One man's "power user" is another man's "too much free time on their hands".

    Any time spent configuring the tool prior to use is overhead that reduces the productivity of the tool.

    I remember when I first switched to Ubuntu and Gnome from Windows. I sat down at my computer, mindless slave to routine that I am, and started looking for housekeeping tasks to do, like I was used to. And I was kind of disjointed, because I was so used to dumping a half hour into screwing about with Windows and accomplishing nothing productive on a regular basis that I did it obsessively so things would be ready to go when I had work that was urgent. But there was nothing like that to do. I just stared at a computer which no longer needed me.

    It felt really weird to just walk away from the machine and go for a walk in the park, like I was doing something sneaky that I would pay for later. Took weeks to really adjust to all that extra free time that I had because I didn't need to keep screwing about with my machine to keep it properly functioning.

    If you want to tweak things, try planting a garden.

  • by dbc001 ( 541033 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @01:17PM (#27690107)
    I just installed the RC the other day, and unfortunately I've seen several crashes and freezes - mainly when switching users and when trying to run Boxee and Sauerbraten.
  • Re:Jaunty (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday April 23, 2009 @01:25PM (#27690265) Homepage Journal

    The Gnome devs are working to move much of libgnome into GTK, so things will get better.

    I just wish they'd work on making a nm-applet that works right (e.g. stays running) or a network config tool that's useful. We keep getting new network tools from GNOME instead of incremental improvements which actually help the user, and they always suck.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23, 2009 @01:44PM (#27690641)

    Interesting. I downloaded ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso via the link you gave, but my md5sum doesn't match the md5sum given in the table.

    ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso -- their md5sum: 60d5d82328b4547511fdeac9bf4d0112daa0ce00

    my md5sum after downloading via the link:
    66fa77789c7b8ff63130e5d5a272d67b

    Even stranger is that googling my "wrong" md5sum gives results.

  • First things first (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ThatsNotPudding ( 1045640 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @02:02PM (#27691053)
    Remove all Mono-based applications and install MonoNoNo to keep the MS-backed trojan horses out. http://boycottnovell.com/wiki/index.php?title=Mono_Applications [boycottnovell.com]
  • Re:Jaunty (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Locutus ( 9039 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @03:00PM (#27692227)

    It would be tempting to try the Netbook Remix as an alternate desktop( session type ). Putting all that wasted space in the title bar to use is a great idea. Using Kubuntu, you'd gain another 40*(screen width) pixels across the bottom of the screen and twice that if you were using standard Gnome-based Ubuntu.

    Anyone tried `sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-remix` yet?

    LoB

  • Re:Notifications (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @03:01PM (#27692249) Journal

    I just recently switched from Kubuntu to Arch and while Arch could use a little polish (while still being lean & mean) I'm liking it a lot right now. Bear in mind that while I was using Kubuntu, I used to do kernel development on Gentoo so I had enough of a skillset to handle Arch. So far I like that Arch has a fast package management system that works, allows me to compile my own packages without forcing me to do so (unlike Gentoo) and generally does not force me to install & run crap I don't want (Ubuntu: making me run wpa_supplicant... on a desktop that has no wireless card!!??!?!)
    Arch does have some problems, like missing packages for wine in 64 bit (fortunately it is not too hard to build via AUR), the default vim installation would not recognize my .vimrc files so I had to blow-away the system defaults which made vim unusable for me, and it took more hacking to get ssh-agent working than it did with Ubuntu which set it up automatically. So: Arch wins on the core, loses on some of the polish, but I think it strikes a better balance for me than Kubuntu was doing... plus Arch's KDE 4.2 packages seem somewhat better behaved.

  • by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @03:25PM (#27692649)
    I'm a nerd, and I have no idea what "remix" is, beyond a music industry term. And no, I won't justf'ngoogleit.
  • Re:Jaunty (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Requiem18th ( 742389 ) on Thursday April 23, 2009 @09:46PM (#27697077)

    This is a good argument against "customize only" desktops (if there are such things). Sane defaults and minimalist interfaces don't exclude highly customizable software.

      I love freedom and competition but I think KDE vs GNOME vs XCFE is a net negative for the FOSS comunity, fortunately you can mix and match.

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