ibex
Just when people all over the world were enjoying the release party of Ubuntu 8.10 , I stuck to hardy with my internet down on release day. You know how it feels not having a hands on with the new release even after 24 hours. Finally, downloaded the iso the next day and boot it right away. Here are some of my observations.
1. Boot time: Extremely fast. Live CD boots just within a minute. No issues with that. Infact hoping a major turnaround in boot time optimization by the time of Jaunty.
2. Installer: A few new features added. Graphical representation of the partitioning process was introduced. I personally liked the idea, but surely not the implementation. If you have a terribly large hard disk ( >200 GiB), then you would be wasting 10 minutes for the graphical representation to load.
3. Display: Right after the first boot which happened at about 20 minutes of Live CD, I found that my display was hopeless. I have a widescreen monitor with default resolution 1280×720. There was no way that I could change the resolution so that the display detected widescreen rather than square. The package displayconfig-gtk was made obsolete. Now, I had to rewrite the whole of xorg.conf manually. WTF?!? back to the times of manually editing (wait, did I say editing, sorry, rewriting the whole of) xorg.conf. Anyways, I did it. Finally, after a reboot, all new Ibex was ready to rock on my system. You can find my discussions with displayconfig-gtk’s developer here. (Don’t miss Madhusudan’s post there 
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4. Applications: Everything worked out of the box. Madhusudan’s blog helped me in gtalk pidgin issues, adding a simple line barring which I did not find any application misbehaving or freezing. The all new user/user status switcher is really cool. Started liking it the moment I saw it. Firefox worked like charm and fonts this time was just appropriate as against Hardy where Firefox was completely messed up. I would have loved to see OpenOffice.org 3.0, but no. Audio and Video just worked, no hassles after installing the codecs. ( you can find my codec installation guide here).Nautilus tabbed window is another advantage.
5. Tasksel: Some more additions to make tasksel more awesome. Tomcat server and Virtual Machine host can now be installed with just a simple Enter Key. Great job.
6. Shutdown: Here is where Ibex gave me a shock. When audio rendering is ALSA, system would not shutdown. This seems to a major problem for most of us around. Hoping for a fix early. Solution – switch to pulse audio or OSS. (System -> Preferences -> Sounds)
So, finally I would rate Ibex as the best release till date (my experience and usage benchmarks), if not the best October release. What are you waiting for? Go, get Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex now. Download Here.
Wishing you all a great six months with Ibex, I sign off with lots of expectations from Jaunty Jackalope.
