Finally (two whole days after release!) upgraded my machine to Ubuntu 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex (which is a kind of goat, hence my title…)
Haven’t tried everything yet, but it boots faster than 8.04, all my apps survived the upgrade, and despite a glitch in the upgrade process it appears to have gone cleanly.
Some pros and cons:
- Muine is back, apparently working after two Ubuntu releases of being utterly busted. It’s currently sitting on desktop #6 sucking up CPU cycles indexing all the music I’ve added to my collection over the past year!
- Encrypted Private Directories – awesome. This is the sort of thing that I’ve always wanted to try, but never been brave enough. Kudos to Ubuntu for making it so easy!
- Intrepid’s wallpaper is cool, but way less cool than Hardy’s heron. The ibex’s horns look like they’re formed from a coffee-cup stain ring on a piece of paper…
- Another boring, non-informative startup scrollbar. Seriously, Dapper got this right – scrollbar + non-threatening text scroll of what’s happening to your system. I’ve tweaked various settings on previous Ubuntu installs, but I’ve never been able to recreate Dapper’s perfect startup. Could we get this back please, at least as an option?
- One oddity: the grey “package manager in use” icon seems to stick around for a few minutes after you close Synaptic/AddRemove/aptitude/whatever. Is this a bug, a feature, or some quirk that only I get?
I followed my usual process of torrenting the Alternative install CD, burning that, and upgrading off it – far, far faster than waiting for Ubuntu’s overloaded servers to deliver everything needed for a dist-upgrade!
