Ivan Kuznetsov

It was a fun weekend. I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04 on my Lenovo T61 and installed it instead of Windows Vista on my wife’s new Dell Vostro 1510.

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.