Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala"

[techieMoe]

I'm in the process of downloading the beta which was released yesterday. Has anyone else given this a try? What are your thoughts?

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[techieMoe]

The installer has had some polish. Rather than just a progress box you get a slide show, not unlike Fedora or openSuSE. The graphics are nicely done. At boot you get a black screen with a white Ubuntu logo (sort of like the Apple logo when OS X boots). It's not completely flicker-free though. I still had a couple of console messages about encryption pop up.

[Tarthen]

Worth getting then?

If I install the beta, can I just dist-upgrade to official without issues?

[bigtomrodney]

I'm looking forward to giving it a spin. I'm going to wait for the final release this time though. I'm looking forward to seeing KMS on my intel based laptop but I don't think I'll use the nouveau driver on my nVidia based desktop just to see KMS running. That is at least until there's decent 3D support from that driver.

I see they have some other cool stuff too...they switched from SysV init in 6.06 to Upstart if I remember correctly but they're only starting to use this fully now in Karmic. That should make some difference, it's more like Mac OS X's launchd than Sys V init.

Tarthen, I have done that in the past. You may have a bit of breakage here and there as it is a beta but it's a good way to beat the queues on the day

[Tarthen]

Downloading it now .

[L4Linux]

I tried Alpha5 in a Laptop with Intel graphics and run smoothly for hours from the Live-USB. And the 3d acceleration was good thanks to the new drivers(thanks to the crappy Intel driver in 9.04, I skipped that version). I also tried it to 2 desktops with ATI cards.

I tried the beta yesterday and I love it!!! It feels very snappy from the Live-USB, which means it 'll run even faster on an ext4 partition, didn't crash after several hours of usage and it looks much more polished than previous versions with the updated Human theme (now tolerable at least, may not change it at all this time), the great looking Humanity icons and the super-cool Notification system. Can't wait for the final version!!!

And the slide show during installation is a big Plus for new users, as well as the Software Center which seems very easy to use.

[Tarthen]

On it now.

Hmm. I kind of like it. I hatehatehate the new icons, though. I like Jaunty's. But, regardless:
- Empathy doesn't seem to work
- LiveCD is wtfy when booting
- The boot process confuses me now (two boot screens?!)
- Now I have to reinstall all my MS fonts again D<

But, overall, it's okay. I still prefer Jaunty ATM, we'll see how it goes.

[waterhead]

I have been using the Daily Builds on two new systems that I built. I have these set up as MythTV boxes, so the eye candy stuff isn't really noticeable to me.

It seems to be pretty stable, so the final release should be pretty good. I don't know if I can upgrade to the final release, since I used the daily builds. I had to compile the nVidia ION driver, and the MythTV 0.22 SVN version, so I doubt that I will try to upgrade.

There is one BIG change. There is no longer a menu.lst or grub.conf file. You now have to jump through hoops to change the boot file!

Nice going Ubuntu, way to make things easier!

[jayd512]

There is one BIG change. There is no longer a menu.lst or grub.conf file. You now have to jump through hoops to change the boot file!

I haven't tried it... what kinda hoops you talkin' about?
How are you changing the boot file?

[Tarthen]

It's now grub.conf.

And I'm disliking it. Back in Jaunty. Sound config is too simple. Lost loopback audio, and I really need that.

In fact, I see why people go to Debian, citing "autoconf" reasons... which I'm actually going to do tomorrow. Ubuntu 9.10's not going where I want to follow, really. Nice boot, though.