Both upgrade and installation on both machines went without a single hickup, which was a positive surprise after my last experience with Ubuntu upgrade.
Bluetooth, wireless, display drivers, sound – everything was working from the first start. The only manual configuration I had to make was because of Intel integrated video blacklisted by Compiz. There are two ways to enable Visual Effects on Intel 965.
1.Skipping check for blacklisted cards
- Create ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager (for local user) or (/etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager)
- Add SKIP_CHECKS=yes
- Go to System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects and select Normal
2. Removing the card from black list
- sudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz
- find a line T=”$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12″ # intel 965
- comment it out by placing # in the front
- save the file
- Go to System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects and select Normal
Purely from end-user perspective there are not that many revolutionary changes (you can read the technical details on a number of ubuntu related sites). What I personally liked about 9.04 release is:
- Open Office 3.0
A number of improvements and new features here. Native tables in Impress, import of DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, Solver component, improved charts. Being an active Open Office user, and having to interact a lot with users of MS Office – these are really great improvements. - NetBeans 6.5
- New notifications system
Looks very good – gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling every time you receive a new instant message or connect to network. Mark Shuttleworth blogged about it. - A really small, but nonetheless important change – Session manager is finally renamed to Startup Applications. At least now I don’t need to think every time I want to add application to autostart list.
- Computer Janitor. A very nice application, helps you to get rid of all unused stuff on your computer, but you have to be careful with it – it offered me to delete skype and xmind amongst all other DEB packages.
Other new things that I read about, but didn’t yet try:
- ext4 filesystem support (thanks to 2.6.28 kernel) – although it reportedly improves booting time, i didn’t yet dare to switch to it, better to wait till potential data loss fixes are verified by long-term use
- New, better Evolution (thanks to Gnome 2.26), that is able to to read Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders or PST files and communicate with existing Microsoft Exchange servers via MAPI – need to try that on my work laptop.
Overall, after going through installation and using it for a couple of days – I am really happy with the new release. Ubuntu continues strong and steady development and becomes a more serious competitor to Windows with every new release.
Leave a Reply