Sunday 5 April 2009

Testing 9.04 Beta

As of March 23 Ubuntu 9.04 beta was out. It's a fine piece of work. However there are some regression errors and some promises that Ubuntu does not live up to. Here is what is improved over 8.10:
  • OpenOffice 3.0.1 does work with samba shares at last. The workaround mentioned in this blog is not required any more
  • System menu and User menu have been reorganised and unified. It requires learning but it's clear at last.
Here is my list of things that do not work:
  • Scanning with Canon FB363U still does not work. It's a shame that this is not addressed.
  • Network manager looses connection to wireless access points regularly. This was an issue in 8.10, got better eventually but is back with full force. Hope they fix this one before release date.
  • There is an error in network manager related to how they fetch the password from the key ring. I posted this as a bug previously but the developers in charge deny to acknowledge it. Do they not read their own source?
  • Bootup is supposed to work faster. Well maybe if you upgraded from an old 486 to a modern machine. On my machines this is definitely not the case (HP nx8220 1GB RAM, 2.0 GHz: 8.10 -> 1m25s, 9.04 -> 1m23s)
Some issues I have to sort out yet:
  • With every upgrade my test machine became louder. The fan works 100% yet the motherboard and harddisk still run hot. I would suspect the machine to slowly die but launching 8.10 from CD provides a clean, cool machine that does not show the symptoms. I don't know what that is.
  • Deluge every now and then stops operating for no obvious reason. It declines to continue downloading torrents. Using Transmission on the same file works fine. Strange
Some of these issues are reported on launchpad, some are still under investigation.

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