I’ve now migrated my work laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), which went pretty smoothly. I played some games to use internal mirrors, but still use the graphical update process (instead of just dist-upgrade), which all worked out well.
New in Jaunty
One of the bigger items that got press for Jaunty was their new notification system. I really does rock. It looks slick, and is very consistent, and I’m a fan. I’m also a fan of the new splash screen. All these bits are cosmetic, but something that looks beautiful is important in using a computing environment.
Bugs Fixed
I’ve had a number of bugs that I used to have to work around, now they work correctly:
- there used to be a race in bringing up superswitcher when gnome started that meant it didn’t get to lock out the caps lock key. So I had to stop and restart it after a fresh login. That appears fixed.
- Jaunty now understands the right suspend settings for my nvidia card, no need to adjust that in the acpi hal configs any more.
- emacs-snapshot is now current enough that it loads my configs perfectly. For the first time in 10 years I’m now running a prebuilt version of emacs/xemacs for daily development. /usr/local just got a bit smaller for me.
Dear Amarok… why do you suck now?
The Amarok team took their application off a cliff with version 2.0 (which is now what’s in Jaunty). All support for syncing devices is gone. While some aspects of their UI is neat, including podcast search, I’m really not interested in going back to rsync for device management. It’s also really unclear that is ever coming back. Fortunately, banshee seems to have gotten pretty good, so that’s where I’m at now.
Update notifier, where did you go?
Update manager doesn’t display the orange star for daily updates any more. There is a workaround listed in the bug, and a lot of this is wrapped up in the philosophy of the new notification system. However, I really liked my daily updates. I get that the team was trying to get stuff out of the notification tray but this seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Final Thoughts
It’s really nice to see Canonical push Linux into something that is beautiful, consistant, and flexible. I find myself tweaking my volume settings just to get the nice notifications. 🙂
It's always more complicated 
Hi Sean,
I’m using emacs-snapshot in hardy heron and I’ve had apart from a small issue with htmlize, I’ve had no problems with my emacs extensions. Which ones caused you problems in earlier builds?
Jared
LikeLike
proportional truetype fonts weren’t working quite right earlier on, that the final thing I needed to not build my own.
LikeLike
The new amarok blows monkey chunks. It doesn’t automatically load up my old playlists, and you can’t open an m3u file either. It’s like someone said “This amarok thing is pretty cool, but can you make it less useful?”
LikeLike
@Nick, I know, it amazed me after I upgraded a machine a month ago, and got very confused by all the regressions in Amarok, then found out they were “design points”. Ug. At least that got me down the banshee path earlier.
LikeLike