Soapbox Rants and Raves

Apparently, I like to live dangerously; last week I upgraded my Ubuntu box to the 9.10 beta. Unlike my last upgrade, this one went off without a hitch. Not surprisingly, I seem to have 100MB updates every other day, but even so, the box is rock solid. The only annoying thing is that many of the updates make me reboot, I almost feel like I’m running Windows! The list of new features is quite extensive. The most obvious change appears on the initial reboot; the login manager and upgrade to GNOME desktop environment. With every release, the user experience becomes more and more polished.
Throw in Avant Window Manager and Screenlets, and you have a really nice looking, easy to use desktop. Other than doing my checkbook (which some might call old school), I have no need for a commercial OS. Everything I need to do is available, Open Office, GIMP, Empathy, Firefox, etc.  This release included some work around boot performance and changes to the login manager. I didn’t really notice any boot time differences (this might not be obvious on a Quad-core, SATA machine), but the login manager is much nicer. I can see this being a big win for people that share a computer at home and user multiple accounts.

Presumably, in a attempt to create another income stream, Ubuntu created https://one.ubuntu.com, personal storage in the cloud. I have been recommending DropBox to my friends, as it has worked very well for heterogeneous environments, supporting all of the major platforms.

There are numerous technical advancements, but my primary motivation is to have a usable development box, one that delivers me a user experience similar to the expensive options and provides all of tools I need (database, Servlet container, web server, etc).  I have been using the 64-bit version of Ubuntu for over a year, it has never been as “issue free” as the 32-bit version I run on my old laptop. However, it is getting much better. I finally have Flash integrated perfectly, this has been a persistent issue for me… I recently tried to get the new Hulu desktop working, but I think it wanted the real Adobe Flash Player. I had been using one of the alternative, non-Adobe implementations and it was quite flaky and unreliable. I finally did a clean install of the Adobe plug-in and am seeing much better rendering; I have not had success with the Hulu Desktop yet, but Google Analytics, YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, WordPress, all web sites that rely on Flash, work perfectly for me now.

So far so good with my upgrade, I’m much happier with this release. Hopefully, your upgrade is as smooth! WorksWithU was an interesting site I found this morning, it seemed to have a lot of information on the upgrade and Ubuntu in general, give it a look!