Jaunty Jackalope Review

Ever since jaunty released , I had cleared made up my mind not to try it out. I thought 6 months was too little time to spend with intrepid . I was completely configured and running smoothly on intrepid that I never felt the need for upgrading to the next version though I heard about the new notification system or the awesome boot up time . But yesterday night , I was crazy and wanted to do something and installed jaunty . So this is sort of my review. Now what made me so crazy was that , I had failed in all my attempts to install amarok 2.1 in intrepid . It just wouldn’t install . All it did was install amarok 2.0.1 and i downloaded the source of 2.1 and compiled and tried to install. Still failure . So I was determined to do something successful and was convincing myself about the upgrade . So then came the confusion of whether to go for kubuntu or ubuntu . Because some of the kubuntu plasma screen shots were just awesome and inviting . I some how settled with ubuntu and gnome .

At first , the Live CD itself was fast . I couldnt see any lag and I tried to see if it had the latest drivers for my nvidia graphics card ( this sort of screwed the first boot after my installation ) . It downloaded the drivers succesfully and thinking it was a normal install , had asked me to restart . I chucked it and went along to install jaunty and the installation was also quick . Using Ext4 now . And then the first boot struck the panic .

Since I had downloaded the nvidia drivers in my live session to check if drivers do exist, it had downloaded it on to the RAM and marked it to be used on the next boot which happens to be my first boot after installing . But sadly the downloaded drivers are no more because it was temporarily on RAM and the Xorg crashed saying not able to find the nvidia driver modules.I recovered from that and then went on to configure the system ( first update in FB that I am into jaunty now ) . Then I went on to download the proper nvidia drivers this time on to my / and enabled it . Installed compiz , and transferred all the config files from intrepid that I had taken back up to jaunty  . All my themes and Icons , fonts , splash screens , GDM s from intrepid are now on jaunty . In about 2 hours , I was totally settled with Jaunty . This is what I really liked about Ubuntu when compared to Fedora . If I was doing the same process in Fedora , it would have taken me easily about a day or more . I got everything installed in Jaunty in a Jiffy from realplayer , texmaker , vlc , amarok , php5 , falsh players and stuff . Did all changes to bashrc , fstab , etc etc .

In general , I was really happy to have switched to Jaunty for the following

1. Awesome boot up time . It booted off in some 20-25 secs .
2. The system was a bit fast now .
3. Ext 4 is something new
4. The new notifications
5. The new usplash and GDM .
6. Was surprised to see the new Xorg server work fine without any of the so called reported probs .

I don’t think I had any probs apart from the initial nvidia screw up and one pidgin screw up . I had added a buddy pounce in my pidgin to shut down pidgin when this somebody@gmail.com comes online . And looks like the pounce was activated each time I tried starting pidgin and that “somebody” was online . Gave some segmentation fault because I was trying to kill pidgin from itself I guess .  Apart from all these jaunty looks new and exiting and yeah , I finally had amarok 2.1 in my jaunty and it was making good progress towards to a stable release with all features of amarok 1.4 . From now on , I guess all that is between upgrading from one ubuntu release to another is just 4 hours of work and a really fast internet connection

And I am mirroring the repos for jaunty from IIT M tomoro . So ppl who need it can get it from me .. or I ll put it up in coll when I am back
Any reviews or followups , leave it in comments please .