Ubuntu 9.04 release and first impressions

Wow who would thought Geeks could drink so much? So The Ubuntu launch party in Manchester supported by BBC Backstage went very well. We had about 60+ people turn up and enjoy the night. Thanks to Lucy for arranging most of the event. There's quite a few photos around the place including Flickr.

ubuntu cake

I decided not to upgrade my laptop at the party, instead I decided to upgrade it when I got back from the party. Upgrading was very straight forward and within one hour I had new Ubuntu login prompt. Unfortunately thats where the start of the problems started.

I've been having problems with the firewall on my machine for a while now but in 9.04 it broke and thankfully got fixed by flushing all iptables. But then I noticed my Dell's wireless isn't connecting to my wireless point, correctly. So its connected but there's no signal for some reason. Interestingly enough, it gives me a 10.x.x.x address while my actual network is based on the simple 192.x.x.x class of addresses.

Finally Compiz Fusion isn't working at the moment, once again this wasn't actually a upgrade issue. It wasn't work a while ago due to a display driver update. For all the moaning and problems, ubuntu 9.04 is faster. Startup times are quicker, login time is quicker and i've noticed Ubuntu is making more use of my vast amount of laptop memory that 8.10. The growl like notifications are very nice and I look forward to seeing applications like Twirl taking advantage of them soon. I've yet to convert the hard drive to the new Filesystem EXT4 but I've already had some experience with it via my brief time with Fedora 10.

I fixed the Wireless problem, I worked it out from a comment left on the picture. Daemon.log.0 pointed out that the wireless was set in Adhoc mode for some reason. So I switched it and its all good now.

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io