Jaunty!

I took the time to upgrade my Linux install on the borrowed laptop (HP nc6000) the day before the official release (you know, beat the crowd). The upgrade went very smoothly and other than not having a complete set of repositories (I had the required but not the optional ones enabled) the upgrade went very well. It went well enough that I went ahead an upgraded the dual boot Pentium 4 desktop that I use (and Ubuntu runs great on it...even the eye candy) he next day.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the newer graphics on usplash. While eye candy is not normally a big deal, this looks a lot better than its predecessor, which looked much better than the one before it. All in all, usplash gets exponentially better each time Ubuntu releases an upgrade for the stellar OS.

The next thing I noticed was a default install booted from grub to login in less than 45 seconds. Once I tweaked it some, it came down to about 40 seconds. Not too shabby. Other than that there was not much to really notice. There are newer versions of tools and Open Office is at version 3.0 (a nice enhancement) and even a new tool or two (there is a clean up tool that I cannot place the name of at the moment...a crap cleaner-ish program for Linux).

When I took the time to upgrade my desktop install the next day, the first thing I noticed on it was all the eye candy worked much better than it did on the previous release. I am not sure if it was an Nvidia thing or not, but the banners of the windows left artifacts on the screen when Compiz was turned on with the last version of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). Now with Jaunty, the animations are super smooth with the same video hardware (FX5600). Again, while eye candy is not a big deal normally, I got to giggling when I saw what I could do in Linux that you cannot do with Vista using the same hardware.

I managed to get a good, complete repository list and copied it over to both machines. Considerfing the sheer number of people updating their Ubuntu installs, it took a while but it was worth the wait. My machines are fully up to date with Ubuntu code. My laptop and dekstop both work well. The only thing that I could not get to work (so far) was a couple of .mov files from "The Animatrix" that were free downloads. Everything else played. To be honest I did not try them in VLC...I suspect it would play them.

As I continue testing I will keep you up to date.