Been using version 9.04 of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackelope, for a few weeks now. I have it running on 2 of my 3 personal machines and I get pretty regular use out of it for my daily computing. The first machine I installed it on was my Asus 901 EeePC. I did a fresh install on my netbook so I could see how smoothly the installation would go, and to judge how netbook ready the new OS was. Setup was a breeze. Not really a big surprise there. Since there was a lot of focus placed on making Jaunty Jackelope much more netbook friendly I was pleased to find all my hardware working immediately. That is something that took a new eeepc specific kernel in previous versions of Ubuntu. Some of the function key hardware controls, such as Fn+F2 to turn the wireless on and off, still do not work until you install the eee-control packages. That is really a minor nuisance. I’ll just have to add it to my list of post-ubuntu-setup packages I regularly install on a new system (currently being compiled for a future blog post).

Now since Jaunty is so netbook friendly now, they have issued the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as its own ISO. If you’ve already installed the standard version of Jaunty, you can add the additional functionality through a single package now at the command line, instead of half a dozen. Simply type: sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook-remix This does include a desktop switcher application to flip between the UNR interface as well as the classic desktop, though I still find it quite flaky when it comes to preserving my taskbar applets.

My second install was on my full sized laptop. This time I tried the upgrade solution. It worked well when moving from 8.04 to 8.10. I was expecting similarly positive result. Not so much this time. I got two status bars in before I gave up. After a couple of hours of the “Downloading the upgrade tool” dialog ended up hanging on the first step of “Upgrading Ubuntu to 9.04″. After going to bed and waking up while still at the same screen, I canceled the install. I tried to do the same upgrade on my desktop but encountered the same problem. At that point I decided to just wipe the laptop and start fresh. At least I knew that would work. Now its entirely possible that Canonical’s file servers were just under far too much strain to do an upgrade at that time. It was only days after the release. Perhaps this has been rectified.

Having finished the install on my laptop I was pleased to find a lot more hardware support than I previously had. I have a Gateway ML3109 laptop I picked up for around $300. It’s always given me trouble with the sound and wi-fi. They both worked fine without any modification this time around. There is a bit of a trade off though. My laptop has an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M chipset for graphics. My options use to be either the open source driver which wasn’t very useful for video playback and GL, or I could use the restricted fglrx driver. Seems though with an upgrade to both the fglrx driver and X server were upgraded and no longer support the chipset. I haven’t fully tested out video playback on my laptop yet so I’m not sure how much of a problem this is going to end up being for me.

Using Ubuntu 9.04 in day to day practice hasn’t really made any drastic changes to my life. It is a bit prettier, as each version seems to get. It is definitely faster on when it comes to booting, which is great for portables. But once you get past the improved hardware support at the initial setup, the excitement stops there. It’s more or less back to same old Ubuntu we know and love. It’s definitely a step in the right direction. No reason not to use it if you are setting up a new machine. But I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that you have to upgrade to keep on the cutting edge this time around.