Upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 along with everyone else in the world (and their dog) last night. Had a bit of a scare when the computer wouldn’t mount /home, but a reboot and fsck during startup cleared that up.
Then I realized I had no 3d accel… this after having flawless 3d accel in 9.04 with the Open Source R300 drivers. Hardware Drivers wasn’t showing me anything, which was odd. Turns out the r300 drivers no longer support my old ATI card, so I need the alternative (but still Free) “ati” drivers. Had to install that manually, because Hardware Drivers thought everything was just fine off in driver-land. That’s the first time in several releases I’ve had to do a thing manually to get 3d working… does the Hardware Drivers app only track non-Free drivers like fglrx? It certainly didn’t seem interested in letting me know the “ati” drivers were what I needed…
That aside, 9.10 is very slightly faster booting than 9.04, and has some new toys to play with. Inkscape 0.47 is the big one for me — lots of new shiny there to distract me!
Dear Epiphany Developers, The 1990s Called, They Want Their Browsing Experience Back…
One odd glitch in the Epiphany webbrowser – “Open in New Tab” is gone from the right-click context menu when you right-click on a link. “Open Link” and “Open in New Window” are the only optionsf? Epiph still supports tabs (middle-click still works, thank Dog), but removing “Open in New Tab” seems like a major regression. Last time I used a non-tabbed browser was the late 1990s, for crying out loud. (Opera FTW. If Opera didn’t exist, what would Firefox and Co. have copied?) “Open in New Window” is almost always a waste of time. Tabs are a far more elegant solution than having your app puke windows all over your desktop, so why has Epiphany made them unavailable from the right-click menu?
(I tried to file this as a bug over on Launchpad, but LP timed out on me three times, so guess that bug report can wait a day or two longer.)
Aside from the right-click/tabs screwup, the new Epiphany with webkit seems slightly faster than the old Gecko version, and hopefully it’ll be more stable too. We shall see.
New Ubuntu, new shininess (I like the new login & loading screens, very slick!) and some fun new bugs, too. And a faint scent of eucalyptus, for some reason.
