Jamyskis

It’s been out for a while, but I thought I might kick off my blog with my thoughts on this new release of Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu is my distro of choice - since I’ve been using Linux since 2002, I started on a niche German Red Hat-based distro called Go! Linux, moving on to Red Hat 9, then SuSE 9, Mandrake 10, Mandrake 2005 before finally settling in with Ubuntu 5.10. Every new release has been a positive surprise for me - while the superficial changes have never been huge, there have been leaps and bounds in stability and speed.

Which is why Ubuntu Edgy disappointed me in so many ways, in spite of the (valid) explanation of some of the design decisions.

Allow me to explain. Canonical announced from day one that Edgy would not be the preferred distro for stability and production environments and that was intended to be more bleeding edge - hence the name. Still, an operating system which didn’t introduce so many duff packages and reduce the stability on existing ones would have been nice.

I can’t really comment on the installation process as I updated from Dapper using the update manager, although that was nice, quick (ish, considering that hundreds of megabytes were being downloaded via my 6Mbit DSL line) and painless. The boot screen for Ubuntu has seen a major overhaul with a luscious 16-bit (at least I think it is) metallic Ubuntu logo and progress bar and the replacement of the aging init startup with “upstart”. I do miss the old rundown of what is going on while the system starts up (you can’t even switch to another tty while it’s starting) but the speed increase is noticable enough that it isn’t much of a problem.

After that, the standard Ubuntu login screen, which hasn’t changed a great deal. No problems there. It was after logging in, however, that the real problems with this release began to raise their ugly heads.

First of all, GAIM has moved up a notch from the aging 1.x.x series to the 2.x.x series which is still in beta. Now, I will admit that on the surface, the new version of GAIM is pretty cool. It finally supports the custom emoticons that MSN introduced ages ago, and it finally has a decent away system that allows you to register as away for several accounts at once. However, I found that GAIM had an unnerving tendency to bomb out unexpectedly, specifically when someone else started a conversation with me while I was already chatting with someone. Also, if you have a chat buddy who uses several of those annoying custom emoticons (which tend to pop up in the most awkward of places - such as “assume” being written “ume”, preceded by Bart Simpson showing off his asscheeks), GAIM slows your system down to a crawl and it won’t do much until you close the offending chat window. Hmmm.

Next gripe: Anjuta. Now of course, this will only affect the developers among us, but still, it is extremely annoying to have a trusted, reliable and familiar C++ IDE such as Anjuta 1 be replaced with the unmitigated and unnecessary mess that is the alpha release of Anjuta 2. This isn’t a review of Anjuta as such, so I won’t go into greater detail, but it wouldn’t have hurt to have offered users the chance to choose between one or the other in apt. Still, I didn’t have much problem removing the offending IDE and installing Anjuta 1 from source anew.
Strangely enough, I found that my previous HTML editor of choice, Screem, regularly bombed out while editing, such that it became pretty much unusable. I say strangely because the version of Screem included in Edgy is the same as in Dapper. This tells me that there is a problem with a library being used somewhere that is perhaps a bit too bleeding edge for its own good.

To top it off, I found that after running a security update of the system, it would subsequently and frequently refuse to boot, which would only be remedied by briefly running the Dapper live CD installation, refusing to reformat the hard drives and proceeding with the installation until it reached an error.

Edgy is not something I can really recommend unless you’re a bleeding edge developer. With the exception of GAIM and Anjuta, no noticeable user differences were apparent. If you really feel the need to use Anjuta 2 or GAIM 2, you can compile from source and run them on Dapper, which, IMHO, is the far superior distro.