2 Days of Ubuntu 9.04 / Jaunty Jackalope

Ah yes, finally was able to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope the other night. I decided to check it out already because it’s been quite a while since it was released and my internet connection was better. In any case, here are some observations after the upgrade :

• Wifi was gone. But no worries. There’s a new wifi driver included apparently. For a time I was using Madwifi with Intrepid Ibex but JM Ibanez told me that there is a newer driver, which is ath5k. It was disabled, somehow, so basically we just had to enable it and then I had wifi going. The nice thing about wifi now is that even if i resume from suspend, I could connect to the wifi network. It wasn’t like that when I was using Madwifi on Intrepid.
• No video playback. I am not sure what the cause of this is yet. But I’ve observed that I could not play any videos at all. SMplayer warns me about my mplayer as having the older version. For some strange reason I could hear the sounds but there are no graphics whatsoever.
• Certain settings were overwritten. My default browser is now Epiphany — which wasn’t because I’ve set it to Firefox waaay back.
• They changed the screen configuration tool’s name to “Display” instead of “Screen Resolution” — Not a bad idea, IMHO, considering it’s not just about the screen resolutions anymore but the entire setup of your display screen/s, especially if you’re using an extended monitor setup.

I have nothing to say about performance yet. But in any case, Jaunty Jackalope seems to be running just fine on my Acer Aspire One. No noisy fan issues, my volume control keys work, my screen brightness buttons are fine too. Still no wifi LED indicator but I’d manage anyway.