Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
Having upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Jaunty a week ago, and having completely failed to find the time to do a clean install over the weekend I found myself contemplating whether the upgrade was worth it.
Currently, my opinion is no! If you're happily running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) then my recommendation is strongly to stick with it. It's not perfect, but it has a Network Manager that works (more than once per reboot) with 3G / HSDPA / HSUPA / GPRS / GSM modems, and if you use your machine with a secondary monitor or a projector, the Display configuration utility also works.
Since my upgrade to Jaunty, I've had to reset my display settings to something usable by manually copying in a known good /etc/X11/xorg.conf file every time I've attempted to use more than the internal laptop monitor and I still have the annoying X11 hang bug caused by Intel i915 hardware/firmware/drivers or DRM/GEM. I already documented the requirement to kill trackerd in the face, so the only real advantage I see to the release at the moment is an increase in prettiness of on-screen status reports (for volume, brightness, etc.) and OpenOffice.org 3.0. The upgrade doesn't even give me the latest version of Netbeans (probably only of relevance to people who develop software using Netbeans, I'll admit.)
My recommendation is to stick with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and manually install OpenOffice 3.0 and Netbeans 6.5.1. While I have no intention of migrating away from Ubuntu, I do hope that perhaps the next release will be a little more tested prior to release.
posted at: 08:55 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
