My hardware
- Dell Inspiron 1525
- Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor
- 250GB 5400RPM SATA hard disk
- 4GB RAM
- Intel graphic card
Live CD boot
I put my cd in and boot the live environment (I found it a little bit slow but that’s not a problem since it’s a live…), everything is perfectly configured and working, with a few clicks I join my wireless network, check google.com home page just to be sure the connection is working and start the installer.
My partition schema
- sda1 – 2GB – SWAP
- sda2 – 10GB – root partition (with Ubuntu 8.04.1 installed)
- sda3 – all the remaining space – /home
Installation
I start the Ubuntu installer, fill in all required data, tell the system that I want to format my sda2 partition and mount it as the root (”/”) and to mount my sda3 partition as /home (without formatting it). A few more clicks and the system was installing, time to take a coffee.
Here comes a problem, I’m back from my coffee and I see no installer on my screen, it’s crashed! So I’m launching it again, retype my info but I can’t see my partitions anymore…
Rebooting…
Relaunching the installer, filling data and start the installation process, it’s about to finish when it crashes again, I take a look here and there in the logs and see that’s something about the migration assistant (actually I have nothing to migrate, I’m using my old home directory…).
Rebooting again…
I remember that’s possible to launch the installer disabling the migration assistant thus I open a terminal and type:
sudo ubiquity --no-migration-assistant
and do it all again, this time everything goes fine and I can boot my wonderful Intrepid from my disk.
Note: it seemed to me that this installation bug was not reported before so I did it.
First feeling
Since a first sight there are not so many differences from hardy, I know there are a lot under the hood so I start playing around.
There nothing to say, everything is working wonderfully, from Firefox to Evolution, Pidgin and everything else, I love the updated Gnome and what comes with it.
There’s a really notable thing: Intrepid a perfectly working audio system without having to hack Adobe Flash settings (remember that Flash 10 is available now and I strongly suggest you to update it), PulseAudio seems to be really mature now and that’s great!
I also love the improvements to totem, Gnome’s media player, which now supports subtitles and seems to work just better with video media (also if I still have to use VLC to have full DVD support, let’s hope for a future version to fix this).
Intrepid comes with OpenOffice 2.4.1, I would have loved to see the brand new OpenOffice 3.0 but actually it does no change my life because 2.4 does everything I need in a great way! Anyway if you want you can check why it was not included and how to install it with with ease.
I like the guest session feature (also if I think that it would be nice to start a guest session from the GDM login manager, now it’s possible only if you’re already logged in) and the new shutdown menus.
Conclusion
At the end of the day I can say that Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is really rock solid and it’s absolutely easy to use also if you’re a newbie I’m going to suggest the upgrade to all my family’s PCs/notebooks.
Yes, I ran in the that installation bug (and a few other ones I’ll tell you later) but it’s a thing that could happen only to a few people and I could avoid it just upgrading instead of reinstalling everything but I wanted a fresh start.
What I didn’t like
- obviously the installation bug but again, it could happen only to a few people
- My webcam isn’t working with cheese but anyway it’s perfectly working with Skype and I don’t ever actually need Cheese
- It seems to me that it’s a little bit slower than Hardy, I mean, the boot is lightning fast GDM is slower to start and the graphic environment (compiz included) seems not to be smooth as before. I also noticed that gedit (the Gnome text editor) takes ages to load but it’s a know issue and it could be solved just disabling the file browser plugin.
Vote
9.5/10, go download it as fast as you can! :-)
