Ubuntu Karmic tryouts

5 October 2009

Ubuntu update required

My girlfriend had a very weird bug on her openoffice and on many gtk apps, where hovering the buttons or going one page down or up wouldn’t refresh the display correctly. I have tried many things, but nothing worked correctly. She had also weird bugs while using WPA2 WiFi network.

So, instead of doing an update, as usual, I took the beta of the Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 and reinstalled the laptop.

I usually have /home on separate partitions, and that proved once again to be a good idea.

Installations

The installation went without many issues, once I fixed the Dell MediaDirect mess that screwed up the partition table. The installation was quite fast too. The new look seems quite ok, but nothing “woauw”.

Then, I reinstalled it on 3 other machines.

Good

  • Great installation, wifi and most devices worked, without issues,
  • Many applications correctly installed,
  • Great new look for the windows and overall look,
  • Ubuntu Software Center seems quite a nice step forward,
  • vlc has moved from multiverse to universe and is up-to-date,

Bad

  • nVidia drivers install is still counter-logical,
  • Humanity icons suck. Orange ones are too much of the same, and the grey ones (WiFi and so on) are impossible to read,
  • F-Spot and Tomboy… .Net crap and slow… Seriously I don’t get it.

Meeting Mark and Ubunteros

For some reasons, I met Mark at a conference and said “Hi!”. Nothing important, but still cool.

He made a cool talk about Cadence, Quality and Design.

Then, I met a few cool Ubuntu developers (and former DD) and it was nice, except that we had a big discussion about vlc not being in main.

Here are some of the reasons and some ‘bad faith’ comments from me:

  • VLC is too big for core install (haha, Mono!)
  • there is already one multimedia stack, GStreamer (then WTF does xine hang there?)

Anyway, it was quite cool, and this Ubuntu release seems very promising.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf