Last week decided to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version 9.04, aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Although I knew from the start that there was nothing really groundbreaking in this new release, I upgraded in order to be prepared for the next release due out this October. I have read a couple of articles, here and here. The first one seems to be all worked up about about aesthetics saying Ubuntu is “now as slick and as beautiful as Mac OSX or Windows 7″. The second article seem to be more impressed with how fast 9.04 boots up and shuts down.

A quick search through Google and I find more articles talking about how slick the new release is or how fast it starts up and shuts down. If these articles are anything to go by, then the developers have clearly met one of the goals set by their BDFL, Mark Shuttleworth: Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. But I fear that the developers have focused on these goals too much that they lost focus on two of the most important things for (most) end users: system stability and seamless upgrades.

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I can think of only two words that best describe the whole deal: Epic fail.

It’s been quite a spectacle ever since I saw that security vulnerability report on the NVD RSS feed. Even though the bug has been patched and fixed, system administrators are now left with the task of cleaning up the mess. It would have been OK if it only affected Debian and Debian-based systems. But it turns out the damage is far reaching. Even if you don’t run Debian, if you are using SSL certificates generated by a CA who generated the certificate using a Debian system, your SSL certificate will have to be revoked and replaced! See here.

Amazing what a couple of lines of code can do.

Got a new server a couple of days ago and I just completed upgrading iwojima to a new version of Ubuntu. I’m now running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on the desktop and all I can say is that it’s a step forward for Linux on the desktop. I still can’t wrap my head around the reason for making Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 the default browser on an LTS (Long-term Support) release. But it looks like it was a good decision to do so. The only thing missing are some key extensions that I use a lot, such as Firebug and the Del.icio.us extension.

For a Beta release, Firefox 3 is pretty solid and feels really fast. I haven’t had nspluginwrapper crash on me yet, as opposed to the previous version which would crash from time to time especially when viewing sites with multiple Flash movies. Hopefully, Evolution mail client crashes have been fixed in this LTS release. It’s caused me a lot of grief before when it would crash randomly and then keep crashing when I restart it.

Desktop effects still suck though. When I enabled it, I still get that ugly black screen flash whenever I start Firefox. The new clock applet finally supports multiple timezones, very useful since I deal with clients in different timezones.

Two apps the I use a lot, Wine and Cinelerra, both have repositories for 8.04 so it looks like I have everything I need. Overall it feels like a solid release worth of the “LTS” designation.

My aging Pentium 4-based desktop died last week and once again, I was in the market for a new PC. I had been wrangling with the old one with its loose DDR and IDE slots that have caused me so much grief from time to time when the slightest jar would make things go haywire.

For about half of what it would have cost me about 3 months ago, I was able to get a pretty decent (for my purposes) rig based on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Fortunately, I was able to keep all my IDE hard drives so that cut the costs even further. But my new motherboard has only one IDE port, the rest are all new stuff like SATAII and PCIe. The motherboard is based on Intel’s 945G chipset and as far as cheap motherboards go, it looks like a pretty solid board. I have no need for a new graphics card (yet) as I don’t have any “must play” games right now. Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I last played games on a PC since I got a PS2.

What I ended up with for PhP 17,000:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 (from what I read on Intel and hardware review sites, this chip is now discontinued which explains why I got this one for half of its initial release price)
• ASRock ConRoe945G-DVI motherboard I had to bump up it’s factory-installed BIOS because it kept resetting my S.M.A.R.T. settings for the hard drive)
• Funky looking ATX case that whines like a dying animal when its chassis fan is turned on.
• 4 512MB DDR2 memory sticks

I was able to reuse my old IDE drives. Too bad I could use only one of them. The two remaining hard drives are relegated to “backup storage device”.

As usual, it’s a dual-boot setup with both Windows XP Professional SP2 (32-bit) and Ubuntu 7.04 (64-bit). I really notice the performance difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. I tried both versions to see if there was any perceptible difference. Suffice to say, things are a lot snappier on 64-bit. As expected there were some problems with apps that stubbornly refuse to go 64-bit (Adobe Flash, JRE plugin). But nothing that a quick visit to the Ubuntu Forums didn’t fix.

Overall, it’s been a pretty good experience running 64-bit as a first class citizen…