Ubuntu 9.10 is named Karmic Koala, promises to bring boot time under 25sec

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/ubuntu-910-is-named-karmic-koala-will-eat-tasty-eucalyptus.ars

by old-gregg • 17 years ago

40 22 17 years ago

mdasen• 17 years ago

According to the article, 25 seconds is the target for Jaunty (the 9.04 release) which is pretty nice right there.

Beyond that, Karmic is supposed to being a new UI look (brown no longer). Since this is often the most prominent complaint I get about Ubuntu (ridiculous or not), it will be a welcome change. According to Shuttleworth, "The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it." That's really welcome and I hope they do as wonderful a job as they've done with the rest of the system.

old-gregg3• 17 years ago

I've been using Ubuntu for 2 years as my primary environment and I miss it a lot despite terrible performance of Firefox and flash. Everything else pretty much rocked.

I don't have room for a desk with a workstation PC to run it and all PC laptops are so lame these days that I'm stuck with Macbook Pro but keep toying with a double boot idea.

scorxn• 17 years ago

Some, not all ;) http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:Ubuntu

bk• 17 years ago

I think the biggest increase in popularity for ubuntu (or any linux) installs would come from providing images that include all the necessary drivers and config settings to work with specific notebook models. (Notebooks is where it's at for consumer markets at least). That way I could just download/burn/install, and it just works - no lost productivity due to fiddling.

Hardware vendors won't sell it preinstalled (Dell's offerings are weak, esp. outside of the US), and not even Lenovo is offering a linux preinstalled option. It seems that Microsoft still has tremendous leverage in the hardware markets.

Providing (official) images that are basically guaranteed to work with a range of popular notebook models would greatly increase people's willingness to switch. I really want to switch to Ubuntu/Linux, but I don't want to spend two days configuring X and getting my webcam to work.

nailer2• 17 years ago

...and, according to the article, finally get rid of the skin toned theme.

jskopek• 17 years ago

The most prominent change, in my opinion, seems to be the idea of bringing suspend/resume to servers. I'd imagine this would only be implemented in multi-server clusters, with extra hosts powering down but never totally interrupting service. Is there a reason this hasn't been implemented in other distros?

kenver• 17 years ago

I'm really looking forward to this release. Ive been using Ubuntu for a couple of years now, and really enjoy devloping on it. I don't have to restart my machine that often - usually only when I have to do some Windows stuff, but the faster boot time will be a welcome improvement.

When you consider just how many features are available in Ubuntu, and the general feel, it's amazing that you can get it for free.

I even like the current brown/skin theme - I must be a fan boy. The one big improvement I would like to see though is a fast Firefox port.

pmjordan• 17 years ago

Boot-up times are rapidly approaching the stage where the OS isn't the bottleneck - it's the BIOS. I often wonder what the hell it's doing for those 10-30 seconds. (depending on the motherboard) EFI in Macs is definitely snappier, at least until you start booting into Linux or Windows and the BIOS emulation kicks in and waits around for a couple seconds.

Interestingly, you used to be able to get a decent speedup with hibernating (suspend to disk) but nowadays, with the bootup improvements and larger amounts of RAM (my workstation has 8GB; 4GB is pretty normal these days) it only helps if you've got lots of stuff open in your session. OSX's resume is a lot faster than Linux' though, so there's plenty scope for improvement. I suspect the problem is once again initialising the hardware - controlling the platform sure helps.

suhlash• 17 years ago

I spent the last three days converting my xps dell laptop from vista to ubuntu 8.10. I had to spend over 25 hours to get it to work properly. Things like trying to figure out how to make my dual monitor system work with only one of them rotated 90 degrees. It took so much searching and reading to make sure that what I was doing was not going to mess up everything else up to the point. I am no novice computer user. The task of getting ubuntu to run right is not trivial.

jackowayed• 17 years ago

it really depends. my last install was awesome. It's really good at figuring out the partitioning for you. (I did a dual-boot, and I thought I'd have to manually partition but didn't because it knew what it was doing.)

The actual install is fast and comprehensive. It sets up a lot for you. I remember having to install X on Free BSD not that long ago (maybe 5 years).

I've had good luck with wifi cards, but that is still sometimes an issue.

25 hours seems like a really long time (Unless you're counting hours of ignoring it while it updates and installs all the programs you pick. That is pretty slow.)

I'm not sure what you were doing, but I've set it up on several laptops and desktops and never had to spend more than 2ish hours of my time getting it setup. (Maybe a little more to install and configure everything.)

homme• 17 years ago

I purged my dell laptop of xp and installed ubuntu over it. Love everything about it except the loss of wireless. It even gave me 9 extra gigs on my hard disk, 6 more than the advertised disk space!

If the linux community could step it up on the driver front for wireless cards it would be a beautiful thing.

davidw• 17 years ago

The problem is often the manufacturers, not the people who write drivers:

http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Linux_Graphics_Essay

artaak• 17 years ago

Add to the top of it a properly installed Radeon videocard and you get 30 hours in total.

whatusername• 17 years ago

I spent 4 hours troubleshooting my neighbours computer (it's full of spyware). We basically got no-where with it in that time.

The task of getting Windows to run right is not trivial.

jacoblyles• 17 years ago

Linux advocates should pay attention to the difficulties of installing and maintaining a Linux system in a modern computing environment instead of patting themselves on the back because Windows does some things worse. I gave up the first few times I tried to install Ubuntu. When I finally got it running I was unemployed and had the time to wrestle with it.

Flash and wireless still suck.

callmeed• 17 years ago

You should blog the process ... so the next person only has to spend 20 hours

Ubuntu 9.10 is named Karmic Koala, promises to bring boot time under 25sec

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