Karmic Koala RC drops into the wild Can't wait a week to get your hands on Karmic Koala? Canonical on Thursday issued the release candidate of its latest Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 9.10. Unlike earlier builds targeting hardened testers, the Ubuntu team want as many users as possible to try out the penultimate push of 9.10 before the general release set …
If you want to download it today, don't even try the HTTP download right now (5 pm EST), it's *really* slow. The torrent is coming fast and nice though.
I (dual boot) installed a "daily live" version on one of our student's laptop earlier this week (using UNetbootin and a USB key), and it worked beautifully, from sound to wireless to video and apps. It seemed very polished, even before the RC. The student had never worked on Linux, and he really loved Synaptic specially. He was also quite excited to see Amharic (his native language) in the live USB first screen (we gave that a try just for shiggles, and it was cool). Let's see how long his enthusiasm will last -- but right now he says he might stay in Ubuntu most of the time, since it is so much faster than his current XP installation in the other partition.
Torrent just finished downloading, that was fast...
WiFi Fix
If you have a cheepo "Tenda W322U 11N Wireless USB Adapter"
(Karmic seems to try and load rt2870sta AND rt2800usb).
Then you need to put the line 'blacklist rt2800usb' in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and you should be able to use wireless.
see here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960642&page=11
Yeah its G not N but I have WiFi :)
.......and to balance out the fact I have recently made comments pointing out I think Windows 7 is a steaming pile, I'd better reveal my Ubuntu 9.10 experience.
As an experiment I upgraded to 9.10 yesterday, on the least used PC in my home network. All went well, except it's 'broken' Mythtv; the machine is a frontend only, and launching it leads to a message that the backend database is incompatible.
So if you're a Mythtv user beware; mind you I've yet to try and solve this issue or see if a bug is filed.
Been running it since the 3rd or 4th alpha, and despite a massive cockup in alpha 5, it's a nice improvement over Jaunty. Faster, definitely, and the tweaks to KDE are very much welcome, along with a network manager that finally works (though still not as well as the one in GNOME, which is superb). It doesn't bring a lot in the way of features, but as with all Ubuntu releases it's that steady march that slowly brings in more speed, fewer bugs/annoyances, and greater compatibility.
As much as I like Win7 (and I do) I still spend most of my time in Karmic.
And it is most definitely the best Ubuntu ever. Very impressed with how smoothly it was able to install within a slightly weird setup on 5 year old hardware and handle all devices: printers, display, sound, cameras, scanners, USB gadgets and integrate regrettably non-free or patent encumbered but necessary content (various video codecs, Flash, MP3 etc) with a few extra mouse clicks. Everything works faster than ever. No nasty licenses, no license keys having to be input, no unacceptable big brother remote control or calling home without my consent, nothing in the base product that I can't explore and study, though everything now works so well that for most users and purposes there will be very little need to do so other than natural curiousity and the wider need for IT literacy and competence. This makes non free software look like it's built by a bunch of amateurs in comparison
Well done Canonical, and the entire free world which makes all of this possible.
Odd, in every other comment thread you'd probably be right (including my own Penguin-adorned posts), but:
"If you want to download it today, don't even try the HTTP download right now (5 pm EST), it's *really* slow. The torrent is coming fast and nice though."
just sounds like practical advice (my god, a Reg comment making a *useful* contribution!?) and the rest just sounds like some feedback on the release.
I suppose it's hard not to sound like a fanboy when giving feedback on an Ubuntu release though. They're all so mind blowingly AWESOME :)
Did an RC update on an Acer laptop last night and the few minor issues with audio and wireless just went away. Everything just worked and better than ever. A very worthy update indeed. It also seemed to slim down its footprint a bit as it removed a whole raft of libs and drivers it no longer needed.
I didn't bother to update filesystem to ext4 and weirdly the boot time is longer (!) than it used to be (its meant to boot faster) but once up and running its very snappy and responsive.
All-in-all, top notch.
I know it's a common complaint, but I'm hoping that the wireless on my Acer Aspire One [an original early one] will work without all that tedious mucking about with NDIS wrappers and all that.
Been suffering with XP on this thing [with FAT32, no indexing, etc to get around the crappy SSD] so be interesting to see how the latest installment of my favourite oddly named distro will perform.
Will probably throw Win7 on this thing as dual boot too, to see how it compares on low powered hardware.
Aught to be a bit of fun I suppose.
Steven R
been running the karmic rc for a couple of days now and it does look pretty good. I even installed it on my amd64 machine and everything worked out of the box with the usual ubuntu goodness. It autodetected the nvidia card set up the proprietary drivers in a snap and everything was go.
So far, so good. Another nice release from the bunty devs :)
I like the idea of Ubuntu one to store those really important documents that I can't live without but the one thing that annoys me is when I log in, it fires up Firefox and opens up Launchpad and asks me to confirm I am who I say I am and login. Hopefully this will get fixed in the future.
All in all though it's looking good. I like the new splash screen at boot up and it does boot much quicker (it's got progressively quicker from the Alphas to RC and that was from an upgrade from 9.04) and when it's finally released I'll probably wipe the whole lot and reinstall a nice new fresh install (I've got too much junk to sort out at the moment so I'll back it up to an external hard drive probably never to see it again).
Oh and by the way, sT0rNG b4R3 duRiD Debian may mean stable but it sure doesn't mean pretty :-) (although yes, I am a fan of Debian two, in fact I've just installed it on two older machines).
Rob
Small? This is some new definition of the word "small" to which I was not previously privy.
I dropped the RC on to a non-essential laptop (stupid, I know, I should have used a virtualised box) anyway...the install worked. Then rebooted. Then hung. Then rebooted.
The login screen it fugly (seems to have got confused about the theme).
The "Login Window" entry appears to have vanished, so fixing the above will be non-trivial to the average user (command line and "gksu /usr/sbin/gdmsetup" is non-obvious).
Fast user switch panel is dead.
Desktop is broken (no wallpapper, no icons, no conky, but they briefly appear on logout - just a black background when logged in)
Cron is dead.
Firefox is dead.
Pulseaudio is dead.
I'll grant you that the first three are small, fourth is medium but the last three are huge. I didn't have time to test anything else, nor log bugs (I'll be doing that as soon as I get a chance). I hope the final release can correct these issues, either that or it's flatten and re-install time.
I may try the RC again in a virtual machine after taking a snapshot, but I will say one thing; unless you are technical expert (and if you are running Ubuntu, you are probably not) DO NOT install the release candidate. Once again Linux (this time in the guise of Canonical) shows that it is not ready for the average user.
Oh, and before the morons start slagging. The "average user" thinks Facebook is the internet. M'kay? They don't care about how their PC works and, to a large extent, nor should they.
Not so sure it's such an order of magnitude of improvement over Jaunty, but it does improve quite a few things greatly. The lack of a kde-based grub editor was a a bit of a shock, however, and the change to grub 2 is scary, especially as the configuration files have changed.
On the up side, my webcam now works, even if the microphone doesn't (Skype is, therefore, still text only for me unless I reboot into XP).
I started with the beta and have just been using the distribution upgrade, something I've had trouble with in the past... it's been working fine every time I've used it since a reinstall.
I still keep XP about for some apps I can't run under Linux yet, but I find that for general usage - Internet, word processing, games, more or less everything really - that I tend to boot into kubuntu because of its speed. I re-ghosted back to XP because Vista felt so slow, even with 4GB of RAM installed... and even the Windows 7 release candidate feels sluggish and bloated compared to karmic.
Hmm, so you think that this RC is not suitable for 'general' release. Based on the fact that it didn't work on one of your machines. Well, I concede , since you have a fail rate of 100%, you might be justified in that.
On the other hand, you have a sample size of 1! So, I think that you are perhaps being a little unkind in rushing to write off the RC. Particularly since the anecdotal evidence in this comments section alone implies that other installs have worked fine.
Everything just works on my Thinkpad T43, everything is snappy and fast, even the 3D desktop effects are fast and smooth (video performance in Jaunty was a disappointment)
But the biggest shock is that every single Windows game and app I tried ran on it using Wine 1.1.32 just fine;
I did install Irfaview 4.25 + PTGui 8.x plus VC++ runtimes and gdiplus and worked 5 stars!
Armada tanks (casual game) did work like native, so it did Warblade (OpenGL mode) and Plants vs Zombies.
I have an old Thinkpad X40 and Warblade run horribly slow on it, I'm going to try Karmic and Wine, I have a strange feeling.
In any case Windows is now gone on my T43
>>the tweaks to KDE are very much welcome, along with a network manager that finally works (though still not as well as the one in GNOME, which is superb).
Well, install the Gnome one! ;) This is the beauty of K/Ubuntu. You can just pick and choose the apps across the versions. I have both Gnome and KDE apps installed, picking the best of both worlds.
Also, if you install VirtualBox you can run Windows alongside Linux. In "seamless" mode the apps just run in your Linux desktop as if they were native. You can even cut and paste between them. Emulation is absolutely perfect and fast.
After using Ubuntu for a while you really notice how clunky Windows 7 is when you boot into it.
Aw, and I hadn't even had time to praise the netbook remixes yet!
And if some praise and feedback (positive and/or negative) are what I can do to pay a little back to the people who supply, for free (both as in beer and as in freedom), the software I use to earn my living and also for entertainment at home, then I'll gladly be enlisted among the fanbois! :-)
Re: the netbook remixes, I tested both the regular Ubuntu and the new Kubuntu NRs, on my Asus Eee 1000HE, running from a USB key. I very much like the redesign of the Ubuntu NR version -- that's of course personal and you might hate it. Sound and WiFi worked perfectly -- I didn't test the integrated webcam and mic though, sorry... They got rid of the right hand panel, the one with the silly (in my opinion) "favorite folders" and (not silly) volume icons. These are now in a tab on the left. Better use of the screen. Only little "bug" I saw in my computer was a design one, where the icons sometimes do not fit perfectly at the bottom of the screen (the Games tab, more specifically), overflowing it. Before you ask, yes, I did submit a bug report on that, even it not being exactly important.
Now, the Kubuntu NR is not so much to my taste. Maybe it will get better for 10.04 -- they do say it's a testing ground and all that, and not a release to be used by the faint of heart. I always like KDE better, but in the netbook remixes, the Gnome version is organized in a much better way -- too many clicks to do things in the new KDE NR one. The only thing I liked a little better in the KDE NR in the quick test (long term usage might change my mind) was that when you maximize apps they take the whole screen (not the same as choosing "full screen" from the menu; window decorations and menus, etc. remain visible). That make the little netbook screen feel larger and more capable than with the other display schemes that still use some of the precious pixels for system pieces (top bar, in UNR). Of course, this being Linux, there ways around these things and multiple ways of doing everything. Anyway, will see what 6 more months of development bring us.
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