Ubuntu 9.10 countdown

Karmic Koala is out, and it’s biting at the heals of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

“You are capable of choosing your own destiny. The question is, which path will you choose?”

I’ve been running Windows 7 on a dual boot with Linux Mint for the duration of the Windows 7 beta program. Windows 7 has proved to be a worthy successor to Windows XP, and dragged Microsoft from the pit of despair they hurled themselves into with Windows Vista. In the wake of Vista and the iPOD, the Mac community was able to plough forward with OSX, gaining increasing ground with the macbook pro and air, and more recently had an update from Snow Leopard providing increased speed and some tweaks to their interface. Ubuntu peaked with Jaunty Jackalope and finally released a Linux distribution that gave the Linux community a foothold in the home desktop market. Hardcore Linux users balk at Ubuntu and the heresy of proposing a pre-built linux OS. It has been the long tradition that Unix users compile their own OS and applications, custom built for their own machine, learning the code along the way. There is a steep learning curve for many computer enthusiasts who seek the stability and speed of a Unix OS, but lack a lifetime of dedicated study in the dark art of the command line. Ubuntu broke the mold and provided a generic ready to roll Linux OS that was completely free of any proprietary drivers and codecs, so it could be distributed in any country to any hardware and enable everybody to use a computer regardless of wealth.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released yesterday and continues to build on the improvement of intrepid ibex and jaunty jackalope. I’ve installed a copy of the 32bit desktop edition on a Dell XPS M1530. Installation was much the same as previous version 9 incarnations, with some graphic improvements. Drive partitioning was straight forward enough and it will sit alongside the existing Windows 7 partition without a problem. The OS installed in about 15 minutes and grub picked up the Windows installation to dual boot. I don’t like the new login window. The old version was more streamlined, with the current version requiring me to click on my account and enter my password, even though I’m the only user account on the machine. They also seem to be increasing the number of animated splash screens during the login, where 1 is unnecessary in my opinion. Get to the desktop and stop wasting computer cycles on spinning logos and flashing lines.

Ubuntu comes with no proprietary drivers so I had to install the latest nvidia driver set and download broadcom wireless drivers. This would be a major problem if I didn’t have ethernet internet access as straight away my laptop can’t connect to the internet. Fortunately I do have a wired connection so I could just grab them from the snaptic repository. This wouldn’t be obvious to the casual computer user though and would most likely, from their perspective, brick the machine and send them back to Windows / OSX. After this brief inconvenience I added in the restricted repositories and downloaded all the 3rd party codecs for multimedia playback and I have a ready to go OS again. DVD and MP3 playback is excellent in Totem player and rhythm box. I downloaded Exaile and VLC for myself but the pre-installed media playback tools are excellent. Ubuntu 9.10 comes with Firefox 3.5 which is much faster than 3.x previous versions, with improved Java engine. There is no pre-installed Thunderbird or Sunbird which I don’t understand (considering Firefox is there), instead choosing Evolution, which I haven’t used so can’t comment on. Ubuntu comes pre-loaded with Office 3.1.1 which is more than sufficient for word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations, supporting open document format and mostly compatible with Office 2003 (some compatibility with Office 2007, but personal experience has been bad with powerpoint 2007). Pidin IM has been replaced with empathy in this karmic. Empathy is compatible with all the major IM clients, as well as pidgin’s facebook chat plugin. 9.10 uses the ext4 filesystem as default providing faster data access speeds than previous ext3 and Windows ntfs. Copying files between ntfs and ext4 is noticeably quicker, and it boosts the OS bootup time considerably. 9.10 has also implemented a new “software centre” in place of the add/remove programs in 9.01. This is a streamlined equivalent of the old application, grouping software into easy to navigate sections for first time users. Personally I use the synaptic package library but it’s very useful for new users to find their way around the huge library of additional software that is available.

One of the newer implementations has been Ubuntu one – an online storage drive from canonical providing 2gb of free storage. I found this service to be less reliable than dropbox, which can be installed as a 3rd party application. It had some problems syncing my latex documents in my home folder when I made frequent changes. It was a beta application in Ubuntu 9.04 though and I might give it another go in 9.10. It’s still not bad to have 2gb free synchronized file storage out of the box for free, and an interesting feature that isn’t included in Microsoft or Apple’s OS.

For the complete list of the updates in Ubuntu 9.10, check out the new features page at Ubuntu.com here.

So for the grand price of £0 you get a ready to rock operating system in 32 and 64bit flavors that can (after a little bit of downloading) play high definition movies, music, do all your graphics and office work, surf the net, and send your e-mail. I hope Ubuntu continues to develop in the future, and spin off distributions like Linux Mint build on the Ubuntu base providing custom variations for any perceivable application. Hardcore Linux users might balk at the ethics of Ubuntu but it provides a shallower learning curve for new users like myself to experience the Linux world and break the monopoly of Microsoft and Apple in the home computing market. Once familiar with the environment it enables more serious users to move into the realm of Arch and even Gentoo, eventually compiling their own OS and joining the ranks of the command line battle hardened linux community.

Socialist computing has arrived.