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.