Ubuntu 9.10 is out, Karmic Koala, and I love it.

I got back from a trip away, created a USB stick launcher (VERY easy – hadn’t done that before), booted off the USB and away I went. The installation process has always been very easy with Ubuntu and continues to be. It’s always been a LOT easy than Windows to install but of course Windows always comes pre-installed so most people wouldn’t realise that.

So, what’s new and what do I like about it:

It just works
More so than previous versions of Ubuntu, this one ‘just works’. I haven’t had to use the command line once. I realise that a few people had a few hicups, and I don’t think that 9.04 ever resolved the video driver issue it had with the Intel Cards, but this time, it was all seamless for me.

Improved Power Management
Suspend, Hibernate, Sleep etc. They all work beautifully. This has been a weak area until now. It probably still has some way to go before it catches up with Mac on this one but Mac will always have the advantage of building an operating system that is built for a very specific set of hardware.

New Look
Long overdue and much improved. They are obviously making headway here and I suspect that 10.04 will be better still. It feels a little inconsistent at the moment with the boot up bit having a very different look and feel to the main desktop but, as I say, getting better. The new icons are an important improvement.

New Login Screen
Prettier, easier. Boot times still seem very good as well. Not sure how much quicker it is than previous editions, seems about the same to me, but I’m assured that it is the quickest boot time yet.

There’s probably more and I’ll update this post when I think of it but all in all I’m really impressed. Just the ease of use improves more an more every time.

Update:
Dual Screen monitor support has regressed for me – at least in terms of going sVideo into my TV. It really only seems to work when I Mirror screens which means both resolutions suffer. Hopefully this will work a bit better after a couple of updates.

I have always hated flash. I’m a Linux user so I simply cannot create flash files and using them can be problematic. I hate it because it is closed source and therefore lacking the interoperability that is essential to the Internet.

Moreover, I love ogg file formats. Always have. Far superior to mp3 and accessible to all.

Therefore I’m excited by this:

It will take quite a while for this to catch on – after all, there are people out there who are still using IE6 which I’m fairly sure doesn’t support HTML 5.

So I’m a big fan of Ubuntu. I’ve been using it for about three years now (I think the first one I installed was 6.10) and I’ve really enjoyed watching it grow. With each incarnation more and more worked and it got slicker and slicker. With 8.10 all but bluetooth ‘just worked’ on my Toshiba Tecra A8 and it was a beautiful thing.

With 9.04 I thought I’d install Kubuntu. Gnome is getting a bit tired I felt and KDE had apparently improved a lot since version 4 was released. There’s no doubt that KDE looked pretty slick but it was a nightmare with too much breaking too frequently including it just freezing at least once a day. Very frustrating. I’d also heard that dual monitor support had improved but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get my s-video out to work on my TV which it had with previous incarnations of Ubuntu. The image was very jumpy and unwatchable.

As an interesting aside, the partners of Linux Geeks appear to be important benchmarks in the blogsphere. My partner quite liked the look and feel of KDE and though it was more like the Windows look and feel. This surprised me, I always thought that Gnome was more windows-like and KDE was the fancy one that had taken a very different route. Reading around, apparently I’m the only one that thinks Gnome is more like windows than KDE. That said, who wants to be like Windows anyway? As if that’s an important bench mark – Linux needs to be Linux, not Windows or Mac.

But I digress…

So I slinked back to Ubuntu, and asked for forgiveness. I loaded it up and everything worked beautifully, including bluetooth for the first time. It’s also had a minor make over which is an improvement and I look forward to the major makeover promised with 9.10.

But this time Video just doesn’t work. No YouTube, No Vimmeo, and no avi files playing in Totem or VLC (which I love because it plays ANYTHING). So I gave it a week. Sometime drivers to come through in the first or second update and I don’t mind waiting, I realise there is a lot of drivers etc to take into account when dealing with an entire operating system and I forgive them for not getting every single one right first time around.

But now, some weeks on it still hasn’t been fixed so I hit the Ubuntu Forums and sure enough plenty of others have had the same problem. So the issue is known which means the first hurdle is overcome. There are a range of solutions suggested including upgrading to the new beta driver for Intel’s integrated video card which seems to be where the problem is. I gave it a go but it didn’t work.

I’ll hold tight for a little longer but very soon I’m going to have to go back to 8.10 and nobody wants me to do that.

On one of the forums about this issue someone wrote something to the effect of “It’s free software, what do you expect, stop complaining”.

The thing is that I expect a lot. I expect it to be better than a closed, proprietary system because it generally IS better and because there is an entire community of programmers working on it. The problem is out there for everyone to see so surely someone, or a group of someones can fix it quickly and easily. I realise that there needs to be some understanding that with a ‘release early, release often’ model that there may be a few hic-ups with the new release every six months. But I do expect them to be fixed quickly and with a simple click of the ‘install updates’ icon in the new notification system.

Get it together Ubuntu, this is an important one.

I have Tweetdeck running on my iMac at work and I wanted to get it running on Ubuntu at Home so I thought I’d share with you just how I did that.

First you need Adobe AIR. Adobe seem to ‘get’ Linux more and more these days. To do that, go to the Adobe AIR website and download the Linux version (from here).

(Alternatively you can type wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin in the command line)

Save the file to your home directory (not the directory called ‘home’, but the one that is the name of our user, ie: home/goonanism/

You then need to make the file you downloaded executable and to do this you will need to use the ‘chmod‘ function on the command line:

chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Then you will need to run the file as the root user on the command line:

sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

Next you will need to download the Tweetdeck file from here. Make sure you download the Linux Version.

Adobe AIR should now be in your Applications Menu under accessories. So open the “Adobe AIR Application Installer” and select the file you wish to install (ie the Tweetdeck file you just downloaded).

Happy Tweeting.

(NB, thanks to this post for the help with installing AIR)

I’ve just downloaded the Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference.

A useful one for those of you thinking about making the switch to be 100% Open Source (and Microsoft Free!)

At the end of October, with a little bit of excitement, I attempted to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibis – or was that the last one.. or next one).

Anyway, half way through something went wrong. It stalled on something. I left it for about 2 hours but nothing had shifted. So I did the unthinkable, Ctrl + c. I canceled the installation.

Note to self – never cancel the installation.

So I was left with a laptop that had a lot of packages uninstalled or not working and when I tried to run the upgrade again it told me there was a failed upgrade and I could not proceed.

God damn it, this meant backing up my entire computer, doing a clean install, the copying all the files back. To make matters worse, I STILL don’t have internet at home. In fact I don’t even have a dial tone. Haven’t had one since 22 Oct (but only reported the fault on 5 Nov). That’s a story for another time and involves sheer incompetence on behalf of Telstra and iiNet, apparently I’m being compensated but all I want is an internet connection.

On Saturday I went over to Mum’s and went to town on her internet connection. Included in this was downloading the Ubuntu CD image, mounting it, then running the upgrade form the CD.

What do you know, works like a dream.

I sympathise with Alastair:

In many ways Ubuntu Intrepid is a little bit of a let down. Probably like many Ubuntu fans I remember the heady days of early Ubuntu releases when each one was so noticeably better than the previous. Each new release was like opening a pile of new birthday presents with no idea of what to expect.

I guess you just feel a little less like a frontier pioneer these days. But this is a good thing and a sign that Ubuntu has really come of age. To demonstrate this, I was particularly happy with two things:

• Audio worked perfectly “out-of-the-box”. Every other time I’ve upgrade I’ve had to look back to this post (which, oddly enough is the most commonly viewed post on this blog).
• s-Video also worked “out-of-the-box”. I’ve never been able to get this to work before and am just over the moon about it.

The only thing left is bluetooth and the SD card reader, although I haven’t checked the card reader yet. However I did notice that suspention and hibernation are both pretty slick now.

Update: SD Card reader now works!!! Pretty stoked. The other one I have to test is the microphone – I’ve manged to get it to work before but it’s always been a bid dodgy.