Reilly2040's Blog

Well, I took the plunge over the weekend and upgraded my laptop to the new Ubuntu 9.04.

Fortunately all seems to have gone smoothly. All the main stuff was working happily on reboot, even my wifi. I’m not sure what’s actually been changed in this release, so I’ll need to go through it more thoroughly at somepoint, but I really like the new theme on the login screen. The only downside is that I feel it makes the GTK theme used for the main desktop look a bit older by comparison. The darker theme now used for the login screen is a lot fresher.

The much-vaunted notification system is very nice indeed.  I’ve only had notifications relating to Pidgin so far, but the effect is really nice with a semi-transparent box in the top right of the screen appearing with the contact’s avatar and their status change or message.

My only comment is that it’d be nice to see other apps using it. Its not Ubuntu’s fault,and it is only a new system, so maybe it’ll be more heavily used as releases roll on, but having these nice pop-ups for Pidgin only draws attention to Skype and the like having pop ups appear on different parts of the screen and not looking as nice. It detracts from the integrated feel of the desktop, so I would like to see future versions of apps adopt it. That’s up to their developers though.

Well, as the counter on the right shows, the release of Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope is happening any time now.

As always, I’m excited to see what the new distribution has to offer over the previous version, however this time I find this tinged with caution, as previously my main installation was on the second disk of my desktop PC, so if the upgrade broke anything, I could happily reboot into Windows and keep using the machine until I got it fixed.

Now however, my main installation is my laptop, which is 100% Ubuntu. And as long term readers (both of them ) will know, I’ve had a tortured history getting my wifi to work (not necessarily getting the card’s drivers setup, more the authentication to my home network that kept failing).

So do I grab the new distro based on the fact that it worked in Intrepid, and since its all setup and working, it should survive the upgrade, or do I hold off in the fear that the upgrade will knacker my network connectivity?

Odds on, I’m going to crack and risk the upgrade. Realistically the only thing that’s given me hassle in the past has been the wifi, so if that breaks, then I can switch to Ethernet to try and get it fixed (or pull files off the laptop prior to wiping and reinstalling).

Look forward to an “I broke my laptop” post tomorrow