Ubuntu 9.04 will be released tomorrow. I’ve been trying out the Release Candidate a bit over the last few days. Here is a brief rundown of my experience:
– Downloaded the x86 Live CD and ran install from there.
– I swapped in a separate drive instead of dual booting. I used ext4 for the test. Ext4 is fast but I cannot recommend using it because as far as I know the only disk imaging program that can do ext4 right now is Clonezilla (live-cd) which I’ve not had time to test. I’m a little unsure about ext4 because from what I understand many seem to think it is just a interim step towards btrfs. It should be noted that Fedora 11 and openSuSE 11.2 will feature ext4 also.
– On first boot I installed the Nvidia 3d drivers, rebooted, and then installed updates and rebooted.
– Those who know me know that I do not like the Gnome desktop. Next I installed KDE desktop, Kubuntu. Why not just install Kubuntu? Because there are more tools and features available when you install KDE along with Gnome. To install Kubuntu, open a terminal and type, sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop , answer yes to any questions. At some point you will be asked which desktop you want to boot from, choose KDE. When finished reboot.
– Software – Enabled all sources in Synaptic then I installed: NTFS Config (to properly access my NTFS drives), Samba and KDE Samba tool (kdenetwork-filesharing), Thunderbird, a whole host of KDE apps. I uninstalled evolution, games, apparmor, IRC/messaging clients.
– Multimedia
Go here and follow the instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
Next. Sorry but I don’t like Amarok 2, it just isn’t polished enough yet for me. Fortunately there are others who feel the same. If you want Amarok 1.4, go here and follow the instructions (note – you should uninstall Amarok 2 first):
https://edge.launchpad.net/~bogdanb/+archive/ppa
I’m pretty satisfied with Jaunty Jackalope. Everything seems to work well so far. I will post more in the next week or so, after I get time to install and configure the final version. I’m not sure If I will keep Ubuntu around or not, only time will tell. Fedora 11 looks very interesting and will be released May 26th. OpenSuSE 11.2 will be not be released until November unfortunately.