Ubuntu 9.10: Initial Reactions?
As Ubuntu 9.10 debuts today, I’d like to spend less time talking and more time listening — to you. What is your initial reaction to Karmic Koala? Desktop and mobile feedback is always welcome. But I’m particularly interested in server, cloud and Landscape feedback from IT administrators. Please feel free to post a comment or email me directly (Joe [at] NineLivesMediaInc.com). WorksWithU intends to develop a series of user case studies exploring Ubuntu 9.10’s business performance across mobile, desktop, server and cloud systems. I look forward to your thoughts.
I did not migrate the servers yet. Doing that on release day is a bit too risky afaic, but I’ll sure report once it’s done.
The upgrade is going pretty slow right now. At work here I’m only at 3.0 Mbps so I expect it to take a while anyways. 100 packages out of 2300 or so and It says anywhere from 6 to 20 hours to go? Yikes. Ohh well. I got all day.
Ive beta tested 9.10 and like it a lot. Tried it on a few different systems and all worked fine, although those were fresh installs. This system here I’m upgrading here started out as 7.04 and has been upgraded all along. It is still pretty snappy considering all the upgrades. One of these days I will have to back up my important data and do a fresh install. With the promising sounds of whats in store for 10.04 LTS I might just wait for that to come out before doing the fresh install. I’ll keep you posted!
This system:
P4 – 2.40 ghz hyperthreaded
4 gb ram
500 gb HD
nVidia 7950 GT (512 mb)
Ubuntu only on this system (as with all of mine)
Mirsal: I look forward to your thoughts
1916home: Yes, keep us posted
Not as great as i thought didn’t upgrade properly
1. Use the torrent to download the upgrade to avoid the bogged-down servers.
2. Mount the ISO to avoid burning a CD. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KarmicUpgrades#Upgrading%20from%20a%20Torrent
3. Better yet, wait a month or two before upgrading to avoid problems and wasted time. Unless you enjoy problems, that is…
@endolith: fully agree, if you upgrade anything critical. I am running kubuntu 9.10 on my Dell vostro a90 since beta, and it rocks. I tested on a usb drive before committing though.
My main desktop will wait a few weeks (unless i clone the root partition and try safely in the clone). I don;t expect issues, but it’s just that I am using binary drivers for ATI, and those are tricky.
You can tell how the 100 Papercuts program really made the desktop more intuitive to use. Everything is looking good so far, although I’ve only been playing with it for about ten minutes. But that bootup is looking a bit too gaudy for my taste. What’s with all the fanfare?
I would say that Ubuntu 9.10 is the best thing that happend to my computer the last 10 years. 😉
Its faster, smoother and more beautiful than every other OS!
Great, Great, Great!
Just upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10. It was so easy. Took just a little over an hour because my bandwidth was restricted with other network activity. Now on to my Mom’s PC. I am going to use yuuguu to update her PC. I will have her do it while I watch. She is a senior who has been using Ubuntu on a HP laptop with no problems at all. This will be her second upgrade.
I have to tell you that I was really impressed with this new version. It’s faster and some significant changes were made for the better. Case in point, the sound preferences. A lot easier to understand and configure. All in all I would give the new version 8.5/10. Well done!
I’ve been on the Koala since Alpha 1, and except for a minor mishap around Alpha 4/5 where I chose to re-install it has caused me no problems what so ever, The reason for the re-install was that the bars on the GNOME desktop began flashing constantly making it impossible to even click an icon to start Firefox or even a terminal session.
I have encrypted my /home with eCryptfs and a strong password.
The speed of my system is absolutely great. I can’t feel the ongoing encryption “on-the-fly”, nor can I observe the encoding at log out. And the overall impression of Ubuntu 9.10 is that it’s the best upgrade of those I’ve done in my time as Ubuntu user.
My Ubuntu 9.04 server will be upgraded to 9.10 in a few weeks. I thing I make it as a clean install, and study the Cloud system closer.
I’m really impressed with Karmic. It’s so far the best release, but also the release I had the most work with to customize it for my needs. I’m running a stripped down version (lxsession with cairo-dock, thunar and screenlets) on a Lenovo T61 laptop. Coming from Gnome it took some time for me to find an alternative (I was happy with the good old Gnome but I can’t live with the way it goes in Gnome 3). Since Alpha 3 I have tested Karmic with Gnome, KDE 4.3, XFCE and LXDE so far. I had to replace gdm with nodm cause it needs a bunch of gnome dependencies; otherwise I’d see an ugly grey square on a black background every time I login… At least now gdm seems to be Gnome-only.
After all I have to say I like my current setup the most, no: I love it 🙂 Everything feels faster, even my Nvidia GPU seems to run smoother (GTK is drawn as fast as never before, it seems). Boot time is pretty good considering the fact that the harddisk is fully LUKS-encrypted.
A screenshot can be found here: http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/5909/screenshot001gh.png
I’ve used ubuntu 9.10 RC for the past 2 days, and as a user who hasn’t used ubuntu in several versions (i’m now an Arch Linux user), I was impressed but also disappointed.
the bad: The bootup/login firstly – the white ubuntu logo is nice and minimalistic, but then it goes into that low-colour brown splash too? uugh. the design is nice, but the colours are imo dreadful, and having two parts to the bootup seems inconsistent. Secondly, the GDM theme looks /awful/ I mean, really really bad. It looks like a high-contrast theme. I like the new background and love the new icons, but I prefer the old orange to the brown in the new gtk/metacity theme. I found that using dust (the silver one) and changing the orange colour it uses to light blue looks VERY nice, and it’s very compact, not wasting pixels around the window border etc.
the good: It feels nice and quick, though i’ve always preferred a lot of KDE applications to their GNOME counterparts (nautilus and rhythmbox to name the worst offenders).
It does however, start really quickly. The livecd seemed to start quicker than my installed copy too, it was crazily fast.
the worst: I still think that the notifications should have a single click action, as they are really annoying at the moment where someone messages you, but the window is hidden inside that envelope on the panel, and it would make sense to click the notification to bring up the window. Hell, it’s a copy of growl right? and growl on osx has single click action.
now I use ubuntu on my Laptop, my wife’s Netbook and on our business server.
On the Laptop I have no issues. I’m not the biggest Fan of the unchangeable login behaviour, the changed add/remove-center or the delayed reaction on Volume control. But those are minor things.
On the Server I still have to figure whats new. Than again, i don’t use the gnome interface there.
My real problem is the netbook version.
As I already had noticed the unreal size of the upgrading data for the laptop, on the netbook i had to find out, that 4GB are simply “not enough space on the disk”. And my wife has no Movies, MP3s or other Space-eating things. She has got about 300 text documents, that all together take 87 MB.
Why in the blue hell does the netbook version come with all that crap I never use? What does a OS need more than 3,9 GB?
And if it is supposed to be that way, to show off the ubuntu ability of a wide program range, why is there no Light-Version available? I’m upset with that, cause now we have to run the netbook with 9.4 for ever?
and yes, I did apt-get clean ..
Impressed with everything. So far, except my main niggle is actually with a new feature that’s been hyped alot. The software Center. I did a fresh install as I wanted to see what speed differences grub2 would make if any, reinstalling my software in the new software centre prooved a really tedious task. Unlike with add/remove where you could tick lots of programs then apply the installs and leave the machine for a while, while it merrily went off and installed everything. In software center you have to install everything 1 by 1. Or did I miss something? Very tedious!!
i used Ubuntu today the new version i like it but it has a few lags to it when loading up i have been using Ubuntu for years it is a great Linux based operating system at least you could tell how secure and virus free it can be rather than Microsoft operating systems always having virus on them so Ubuntu thank you so much for this free product
rob
web-friends.com
manager
we use Ubuntu server it great for what we use for our website and other services. we have not tried out cloud yet but we will try it out soon thank you Ubuntu
rob
web-friends.com
manager
Terrible upgrade for me but it’s probably my hardware. So much so I had to do a fresh install (even then it was rough).
Dislike the splash screen after login, complete waste of processing power, why spend all that time speeding up boot times to ruin it with splash screen? (I just remove it, pointless looks)
Dislike new volume control, I can’t control any of channel’s for my surround, why they went with pulse I don’t know.
Love shutdown times, nice and quick, but I only shutdown once a day so I don’t really notice (thanks to ubuntu not really crashing).
Dislike minimal boot screen, it does not show progression along the boot (the boot may be fast but it ain’t that fast), just a logo. What? I went with Ubuntu for practicality not for their logo.
back.
Gordon thought it would be the cat’s meow but it’s the cats scream. On podcasts full screen not work. It took time to make the terminal work. Menus are FUBAR. I read all the great reviews but I don’t see it. Sorry. Wish I had 9.04 back. Numlock does start up…
I just purchased a Zareason Terra netbook, earlier this month, and did a clean install of 9.10. Seems a bit faster than 9.04 but I haven’t seen the improved boot time – seems about that same.
My son installed it on his Inspiron 1525 and the only hitch we had was his wireless card. Hoping to find the time to move my wife’s PC up from 8.10 to 9.10 today too.
I love 9.10 so far. But Ubuntu One absolutely NEEDS to support symbolic links (or a nice front-end that integrates with nautilus that essentially does symbolic linking) otherwise I will be switching back to Dropbox. I want to support Ubuntu One and Canonical and was planning on buying a subscription plan. But if it can’t support symbolic links it is broken to me. I want to back up my Documents folder using U1, not click and drag random files to the separate Ubuntu One folder…
Was using Hardy since launch, did a fresh install of Karmic, was very impressed in how refined it is when compared to Hardy, still keeps the familiar GNOME GUI and menu locations; I like it a lot, very nice!
MacTel install was fine however wireless didn’t work out of the box, as it did in 9.04.(Broadcom). None of the packages for Macbooks 5.1 were ready for 9.10 as of this posting however I suspect to see something soon. I am heading back to 9.04 and doing an upgrade to 9.10 instead of a clean install. 9.10 is visually impressive.
I’ve been a systeems administrator of around one hundred linux ubuntu pcs in our company for about 3 1/2 years now. While I generally love linux and ubuntu as the desktops in our business environment, I have one major complaint about 9.10: open ldap client authentication has suddenly stopped working between 9.04 and 9.10. That’s a major deal breaker for a lot of SMB’s and I’m perplexed as to how it got released in such a state. I’m debating switching over to opensuse for our networks if it isn’t sorted out or the connection details documented for use with auth-client-config by the time 10.04 rolls out! (don’t get me wrong, I’m crossing my fingers and praying it does work, I love ubuntu as do many of the staff using it)
Updated from Ubuntu 9.04 desktop to 9.10 desktop on HP nx6325 laptop and now my WLAN (Broadcom) does not work. Tryed fresh install of 9.10 from live CD. WLAN still does not work. On 9.04 everything worked 100% right from the first install. It seems that Karmic final is not good for my HP!
I have been ubuntu user for quite a while now and decided to do fresh install of ubuntu 9.10 from a perfectly working 9.04. And since the I have tried all I can and cannot logged into my DSL connection at all, this was not an issue with previous versions. I would like some help here. I use a desktop modem for iburst and its connected to my pc using a ethernet connection since it (modem) is shared with another pc. I have even connected directly to the modem bypassing the switch that I use normally and still nothing.
My high speed dsl internet isn’t running at such a high speed. It is noticeably slower than windows. Yes I said it. I am a huge linux fan but their is something wrong on the internet side. Hopefully I can find a work around.
I first upgraded from jaunty with update-manager, update was fine but system was eating a lot of sources without doing anything, even after cleaning all configuration files which may effect new versions of the programs, nothing changed. Then I made a clean install and things are working fine except built-in microphone in sound-converter(although it does work with skype) and the laptop doesn’t wake up after hibernation or suspend, I believe this is due to openchrome drivers but I am no expert or anything.
just a quick add:
my wireless card working just perfect: fast and 95% signal receiving most of the time, whereas it was %60 or so in my campus library.
My upgrade was a bit rough, but you have to put that into context. I was upgrading a three-year-old HP DV6305US laptop which was recalled about six months ago after baking its Wi-Fi board, its video processor, and several other components to a tasty golden brown. So, it’s not the best hardware design out there.
I also installed the 64-bit build, which has never been quite as polished as the 32-bit build (but it’s closing the gap fast).
I had the following four problems:
1. False error messages from Palimpsest. As soon as I had booted up, I got a big, scary error message that said my hard disk had too many bad sectors and was about to fail. So I read through the detailed report to see how many bad sectors there were, and Palimpsest reported … -1. I went looking for reported bugs, found some, and therefore have turned off Palimpsest notifications for the time being. (I hasten to add that it is a great idea, though. It also reported that the drive had been operated at excessively high temperatures, which is undoubtedly true. See above.)
2. False error messages from Kerneloops. These error messages appeared periodically and informed me that my kernel had issues that would make the system unstable. Again, this is a known bug and the computer seemed fine (or as fine as it gets). I went into Synaptic and removed the Kerneloops daemon (just “remove”, not “remove completely”) for the time being.
3. Speaker pops before and after each sound played back. Not at all threatening, but the mother of all paper cuts. Found a workaround in the forums, commented out the line that activates audio power save behavior in my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file, rebooted, and all was well. Once again, great idea — save power by switching the audio circuitry off when it’s not in use. The only problem is that my audio circuitry is noisy when switched on and off.
4. On boot, the first thing that appeared was a “tty1 login:” prompt, which remains alone on the screen for about 5-10 seconds. Fixing the kerneloops issue seems to have gotten rid of this.
With these issues fixed, 9.10 is up and running, and it looks and acts great! But if I’d been a typical Windows user trying Ubuntu for the first time, I would not have gotten past the tty login or the fake critical error messages. It doesn’t seem as though most users are having this much trouble, and hopefully the chances are smaller for those who are installing the 32-bit build.
— Brian M.
multimedia in 9.10 is a disaster!!! mplayer doesn’t work properly, code 127, vlc even, totem doesn’t support wmv, avi…
Looks like ubuntu tries to run while they even can’t walk…
I rather prefer a stable release every year, than a bugfull release every semester!!!
otherwise 9.04 was pretty stable!!!
It is lighting fast! Boots in my Dell Inspiron (2 Gb/160 HD) in just 30 sec and shuts down in less than 10 sec!!! It recognised all the hardware and my mobile broadband is working faster than ever (and consuming much less than windows, with all its antivirus updates and patches…)
Great Job, keep up with it!
Well, in my opinion 9.10 fells more solid. It’s more polished than the last releases and a bit more stable. I also migrated my server yesterday, everything went without a hitch 🙂
The only thing that bothers me is the “system janitor” – it’s a half-baked app that deletes all custom and unsigned packages and can also potentially harm the system.
I don’t use it, but many new users will…
It’s in the system for 2 releases, can’t they fix it already?
We are warning all users in all court systems in America not to upgrade to this release for the simple reason of segfaults and kernel panics, something that is critical here. Best to stay on Jaunty or Intrepid with kernel 2.6.27-11 or 2.6.27-15. What a mess.
I wish the focus were more on stability and testing before exposing the unsuspecting to this. We are not the least happy with this version. Yes, it is quick and flashy and pretty, but give us something that works flawlessly, something we’ve come to expect from Ubuntu. Disappointed.
Hi Everyone
I have been reading alot of comments on here and it reminds me of a operating system glitch for all of you having problems. I love UBUNTU, great system, in the past I was running into some problems up ubtil I downloaded WUBI.
WUBI knows which proper downloads to use in order for it to work with your operating system. It will detect the compatabilities and fix them.
Hope this helps?
The OS was unable to wake up sometimes and kept losing time or gaining it on our test machine..
Did the upgrade online.
Now my laptop has no internet connection.
Its like filling the car with fuel and finding out it will only go at walking pace from now on. USELESS
Its a common fault from my reading on the net.
There is no easy fix available for someone with my skill level.
Imagine if a Microsoft upgrade had this fault..they would be crucified.
But for Linux its OK
The Linux community needs to get it head out of the clouds.
Only then will it be unstoppable.
I had many Ubuntu generations running smoothly, was happy to get it fine on my new Toshiba Portégé m800 with an intel card (i810 if I remember well), the previous Ubuntu worked fine with it.
As reported above, 9.10 just killed my wireless. After having patched the kernel, I got it working. Despite approx. 10 iterations of updates from the update manager, the newest kernel still do not allow any wireless, and even worse, do no more allow to boot (“MAC in deep sleep!”). That’s the kind of experience I really hate after so much years of Linux developments, the kind of things which really kill this OS, and just gives lots of credits to costly systems, as another user says above –
Ubuntu 9.10 is the easiest Linux distro I’ve ever used on the desktop. So many apps work right away, it’s so easy to install more, all my hardware works, and on and on. Essentially, it rocks!
1. Does not load as live DVD on HP computer circa 2000.
2. we use this old HP to test distros before using in UK or Africa where there are many old machines.
3. Ubuntu 8 .10 does load, it is a screen resolution thing from what I see.