Nienhouse

What’s new in Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?

I’ve been running the next version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine to test it and report my findings in an easily read list of things to come. Also, some more in depth information for those who want to know. Along with that I’ve been following the updates mailing list and will be using 9.10 in a VM as if it were my main OS.

Screenshots can be found here: http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

After this post, I will be posting updates as they come in weekly. If they are important, however, I will post them the day they come out.

What’s new up in 9.10 as of today: (ordered by personal importance)

• Updated GDM with a new login screen – includes a session type switching menu and battery meter for laptops. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/gdm.png
• Firefox 3.5!
• Empathy is used for Instant Messaging instead of Pidgin. The only downside is Empathy can’t combine contacts as far as I can see. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/empathy.png
• New version of ALSA (1.0.20)
• Kopete has Facebook Chat support.
• Easy, seamless encryption of home directory is optionally available.
• Comes with UbuntuOne Sync tool pre-installed.
• The user switcher has been updated
  • Only contains Account Information, System Settings, Lock Screen, Switch User, and Quit (logout) buttons.
  • System Settings brings up a settings control panel with the contents of the System>Preferences and System>Administration menus.
  • Shutdown buttons were placed back in the System menu.
• The Accessories sub menu has a Swiss Pocket Knife as it’s icon

What needs to be fixed, added, updated:

• Nautilus crashes when you view “Computer” or any network folder.
• New Default theme (the screenshots are of a personally set theme)

Things I haven’t tested, but are in the upcoming release release:

• New Intel drivers (Accepted)
• New NVIDIA drivers

Next Release – Alpha 3 on July 23

A Karmic Koala

Today I’ve decided to take a look at the Daily Release (07/15/09) of Ubuntu and Karmic Koala and post my findings on it to show you what too look forward to in October!

Due to its early stage, this version of Ubuntu does not have a graphical installer, so I won’t post any screenshots for the installation. There is a new feature, however, to seamlessly encrypt your home directory which I will be choosing for the purpose of testing new features. Unfortunately, I got an error saying it could not encrypt my home directory, but on the up side, everything else went fine. Edit: After boot up, it asked me if I would like to try and encrypt it again, and all went fine.

On first boot up, I see several things. For one, the version of the GRUB boot leader has been updated, along with Gnome.

The new version includes a nice looking login screen which is somewhat like that of OS X, and has a couple of changes. 1) The fast user changer no longer has shutdown functions because those have been placed into the System menu as they were before the fast user switcher came out. 2) Ubunutu has sub menus items!!! WOAH! There’s a Logic Games sub menu in the Applications menu under games. 3) Empathy is used as the default IM client.

There are also a couple of things that haven’t changed that might should be such as Firefox hasn’t been updated to 3.5 and also the Wallpaper is still the Jaunty defauly, but that probably won’t change till late betas or even RC.

All of my screenshots so far, and ones soon to come are/will be in http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

I will be posting updated articles about the new features of Karmic Koala

Gateway T-6345U

I recently got a new Gateway T-6345U laptop and (being a Linux lover) I installed Ubuntu Jaunty on it right after I made sure it all worked.

Installation

Installing Ubuntu was as easy as usual, though it went a little slow due to Gnome’s power manager’s lack of using the maximum CPU speed. Fortunately, there’s a panel applet that is installed by default to help with this. It’s called “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor”. Due to the face that the Laptop has two CPUs, you will need two instances of this applet each set to monitor a different CPU.

First Run

When you reboot after installing it, everything works perfectly… well, almost everything. Three (sometimes vital) things don’t work right out of the box. These three are the desktop effects, adjusting the screen brightness, and the headphones and microphone jacks on the front. Don’t panic if your headphones or microphone doesn’t work, it’s a software issue which I have also found a fix for. Oh, ad you will probably want to add the CPU scaling applet to your panel.

EDIT 06/06/09: I have also found that when a memory card is put into the reader, it is recognized only as generic storage media. I will post a fix for this when/if I find one.

EDIT 07/14/09: I have added the steps to get the headphone and microphone jacks on the front to work properly.
Read More

I’ve recorded a tutorial on how to set up a Wii Remote as a mouse in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), and also written a text version below the video if you would prefer to use that. There is also a text version of this tutorial for those who like to copy and paste below this.

Read More

I’m spending this week in Georgia with Jake Wasdin, the one who I started TanCom with about 5 years ago. This week we will be atempting several projects, like setting up a Wii Remote as your mouse in Ubuntu 9.04  and other exciting things! Be prepared for a bunch of new posts.