Jaunty Jackelope, aka Jolly Jehosephat Upgrade and Review

In the midst of greater than normal chaos at work, it occurred to me that I haven’t done much with the latest Ubuntu, which is 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope).  They owe me some chocolate because I came up with jackelope way before I heard they had picked it.  Since I use the OS almost exclusively, we’ll call it even.  I ran Alpha 5 or so in a virtual machine and it looked and performed fine.

I figured the upgrade was a reasonably safe move, as the OS’s official release date is a few days away.  In case you want to give this a shot, the command is upgrade-manager -d.

I decided to upgrade a less-used work machine from Xubuntu Intrepid (8.10).  The time to finish kept looking really weird, although the indicator stated that the download speed was pretty high.  Just as things looked to be completing, at somewhere near the two hour mark, a screen blanker started.  Immediately after this the cursing started.  The m(*#%*#ing thing would NOT be undone.  To make things more interesting, the pc was on a kvm switch so the keyboard wouldn’t work either.

After another hour, to be safe, I manually rebooted.  Behold, I had achieved Jaunty.  No muss, no fuss.  I went through the menus, set up the display a little, and looked for large differences.  Not too many.

THE IMMEDIATE LOOK

The main thing really made me happy was the total and complete lack of a hideous brown screen of any type.  This was either due to running Xubuntu or my pre-existing setup.  The other thing that was immediately apparent was that all of my icons on the main taskbar had disappeared.  I put launchers there; some run multiple programs, some run one.  Regardless, there were zero icons.  Going through properties, it was very easy to assign the old ones (or new ones).  This was a small but nice improvement.

The main menu looks like it was changed a little, but again, that might be my use of Xubuntu, which uses the XFCE desktop, as opposed to Gnome or KDE.  It’s much faster and seems to do most if not all of what the others do (not as flashy as KDE, obviously).

DESKTOP SETTINGS

The Desktop Settings were moved to one menu, similar to the way it is in KDE.  When you select an item, you can go right back to the main desktop settings menu.  This way everything is in one place, which I like.  The calendar option allows everything except getting rid of the calendar, which I figure comes with removing the program (Orage).  It wasn’t installed before the upgrade.

The new mouse panel is very well-implemented.  It contains a lot more options than it used to.  I am typing this on my second upgrade from Intrepid, which is a laptop, and everything is right there.  I had an app installed called Touchfreeze, which helped end the nightmare of all touchpad users: when the cursor keeps jumping around as you accidently touch the pad.  It’s no longer there and it will be interesting to see if the new options in the mouse panel can overcome the reason for Touchfreeze in the first place.  At this point, well done.

Removable Drives and Media is new.  It sets all sorts of options for what happens when disks or drives are inserted.  Very convenient and extremely user friendly.  I like it.

Not new but appreciated is Session and Startup.  One of my favorite options is for the splash screen: NONE.  If only all software allowed this.  Also is this menu is Session, which tells you what is running currently.  Could be handy, but probably hidden too deeply.

There seems to be a tendency toward windows opening under other windows but I’m not sure whether this is Jaunty or bad programming.  –> yes, it seems everything I add to the taskbar keeps popping up under this Firefox window.

The clock in the panel has changed from 12 to 24 hour mode by itself.  The only option is to go to 12 hour mode with AM/PM.  I’m perfectly capable, even on my worst days, of discerning AM from PM without assistance.  Again, this is an XFCE panel - your mileage may vary.  This was quickly fixed by deleting Orage and Clock, then adding the Time/Date plugin, which you can format any way you like.  Yay.

Speaking of panels, I just discovered a restart option.  Very very good, folks!  My main panel is set to autohide and frequently gets stuck in the visible position.  Hopefully this will help (if the XFCE folks didn’t fix the stuck bug in the first place).

I somehow wound up with two screensaver menu entries, but it’s nice to see that they put the power management button under screensaver.  I’m used to it being there in Windows (stop it - I have to support XP at work).  The power management is pretty comprehensive.  I wonder if suspend and hibernate work.  They are famous for not always working with laptops.

UNRELATED QUESTION:

Why does the dog require closeness when he’s flatulent?  He’s sleeping at my feet while I type, farting up a storm.  The only thing that could enhance the moment would be if he started snoring to accompany himself.

BACK TO JAUNTY

There’s a new addition called Monitor Settings.  It has correctly detected my display as `laptop LDC monitor’ and allows me to vary the settings, just like Display.  It will be very interesting to see what happens when I plug in an external monitor.  This has been a nightmare to date, largely due to the way linux handles both the branded and generic ATI drivers.

And that’s it so far.  Everything seems to work and be in order.   Of course I had to say so far.  We know it’s ain’t over yet.

Will report as things develop.

Thus far I’m satisfied with what I see.