Installing Ubuntu 9.04
I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.04 since may of last year and have been extremely satisfied. I skipped 8.10, and now I’ve started to notice some of my software getting old, and since I never want to mess with backports again, I’ve been looking forward to the new “Jaunty Jackalope” release (I think the names are terrible). In short, it worked great.
It took less than 15 minutes from the time I inserted the CD to when it presented me with a GRUB menu. I pretty much clicked through all the menus as defaults, except I changed it to install over to instead of next to my 8.04 install. It used ext3, and I didn’t see an ext4 option anywhere, which would have been nice. This time it even noticed my Windows drive and put a “Vista” menu item at the bottom of GRUB that worked perfectly the first time, without me having to remember a bunch of menu.lst hide/map commands.
First thoughts: They were right about the boot time, it is substantially faster to get me to a login prompt. The default desktop wallpaper is ugly, but it detected my 1920×1200 display perfectly. There were only 11 updates I needed to install at first, which is pretty good but will certainly get much worse as time goes by.
Wow feature: After I installed the new updates, a window popped up asking me to configure my printer. Not only had it heard of the Canon Pixma iP3000, it had it preselected. I clicked “next, next, print a test page” and after 30 seconds of the printer adjusting itself the test page shot right out. That’s pretty amazing. However in the settings dialog that followed it told me that while the printer was “shared” it wasn’t “published” and I’d have to go see the “server settings” to change that, wherever those are.
The fancy compiz desktop effects aren’t enabled by default, but when I chose to enable them it told me I have a nvidia card and then installed the drivers for me. Restart (login/logout) and its up and running and I have my cube back.
MP3 files played after a couple clicks to a dialog about restricted packages. I understand the dialog but that doesn’t make it less annoying.
Overall, the install was incredibly painless and I was up and running with the defaults in no time. I didn’t have to type on a command line at all and everthing just worked out of the box. Pretty impressive.