CargoBay

Lets start our excursion into the world of Ubuntu 9.10. Yes it's a good release, for the most part. Coming from the abysmal release of 9.04 it's a step in the right direction, however not completely all the way. But lets start with the good pieces. Software that is used the most has been updated to a version closer to that of of the latest release, with Firefox reaching version 3.5 and the OpenOffice suite has been moved to version 3.1. So that that sense the release is very good but as Ubuntu doesn't "control" the deb archives it's based on, that good news should actually go to the Debian comunity.

That said, there is one thing that the Ubuntu release has done that is extremely well. They no longer use the PC-speaker for either the start up or shut down beep. In 2009 they finally realized that it was an antiquated practice, something the rest of the world discovered a long time ago. To be honest I never understood why one would need to know that the computer is shuting down, I just issued the command no more than 10 seconds ago.

There are however quite a few failures still in this release. One is that ssh keys stopped working properly, or more to the point, the time out has been set so narrow it can't use them. Also in a upgrade situation it doesn't clean up after itself, and a lot of icons and such tend to be broken(but can be fixed). And another sound related thing is that the notification that the login window is ready sound about 5-8 seconds before it's displayed. Only an annoyance, but that's a rather big mistake for a release.

All in all the 9.10 release is better than 9.04, but at the same time that's like saying one is better than another when compared to complete crap. For my part I will be moving completely to Fedora instead as the support is better and it's based on their own archives(what I call a Tier1 distribution) as Ubuntu is Tier2 distribution based on the Tier1 distribution of Debian. So closer to the source is the move I'm going to make, but definitely not to Debian. Why that is, will be the topic for another post.