Linux: I'm Lovin' Ubuntu 9.10!

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 on my MacBook (hardware version 4,1), and I'm lovin' it! It's a major improvement, especially since they fixed a lot of the issues that were plaguing me and my MacBook.

I like the new theme and background.

I always swap my control key and my capslock key. Now, hitting control finally makes the capslock key light turn on.

Getting my wireless card to work was easy.

Getting an external monitor to work was much easier than last time. I didn't even have to edit xorg.conf!

Sound works by default, and it sounds better. There was a bug in older versions where the mid-range speaker wasn't turned on.

The touchpad is much better by default, and there's even a user interface to improve it further. I like to turn off touch to tap and switch from edge scrolling to two finger scrolling. The speed and acceleration are perfect by default. Setting up the trackpad so that it wasn't insane was my biggest challenge under Ubuntu 9.04.

Power management continues to be a breeze.

Supposedly all the other things like the iSight camera and microphone are also working well, although I haven't gotten a chance to try them.

I also like the fact that the applets are toned down a bit. It fits in perfectly with my recent sentiments on "calm computing".

Anyway, this is the happiest I've been with Linux in a long time :)

By the way, here's the web page for running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on a MacBook version 4,1.

Comments

ghabuntu said…

Hi. Thanks for your review. This post is one more vindication of my assertion that Ubuntu Karmic is not Canonical's Vista. I wonder why people were expecting full stability from a release that was than a week old.

3:13 PM

Brandon L. Golm said…

congrats ... you've figured out that it's now slightly easier to make your macbook slightly not as good.

5:02 PM

Shannon -jj Behrens said…

Brandon, you don't understand! I hacked my kernel so that whenever I shake my laptop really hard, it looks through all my TCP buffers and kills any TCP connection that contains a buffer with the words "Microsoft" or "Apple" in it. You'd be amazed at how that impacts my productivity and personal satisfaction! Try doing that with a closed source operating system! ;)

5:35 PM

last I checked mach was open source, and it wasn't all that hard to hack the vtables to inject any code you wanted into osx's darwin. :)

Fine you win ... shake your computer. Sounds like a great idea.

8:42 PM

Darwin *is* open source--"kinda". You just can't really do anything with it. I.e., you can't currently take it and build a complete operating system out of it, unless you're Apple.

Hmm, "Apple"...time to shake my computer some more!

8:52 PM

Well I know we will never agree since our philosophies differ...

But saying you couldn't build an OS out of darwin is like saying you couldn't build one out of Linux. GNU seems to have pulled it off. Also, depends on what you mean by OS (let's not talk about chrome os).

And I don't want to build an OS, I want to use one and I accept that I'm never going to build one. I'm trying to get you to accept that for yourself too.

(for third-parties, JJ and I have this conversation every time we get together ... and it's friendly banter, which usually ends in haiku)

9:13 PM

I'm taking the haiku offline ;)

9:18 PM

haiku on IM.
raining insults in real time
jj wins again

("raining" counts as my seasonal reference, since we're on a public forum, I have to try)

9:34 PM

Johannes said…

Hey, thanks for the review!
A picture would male it even nicer!

11:07 AM

> A picture would male it even nicer!

You got it ;) Done.

9:12 PM

Hey, neat! I configured a headshot for myself under Account Information, and it showed up on my login screen like OS X :)

12:52 AM