Without much fanfare, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was released into the wild earlier today. But Ubuntu followers are wasting no time, overloading many of the official downloading sites.
This kind of enthusiasm is certainly encouraging as Linux matures. And certainly, this kind of enthusiasm is much needed for the open source community in general. Whether it is proprietary software or free software, the community acceptance is definitely key to the success of its future.
I have three systems running on Ubuntu at home right now. My WordPress server is running Ubuntu 8.04 server (32 bit). One of my working machine is running Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit and the other is running Ubuntu 8.10. For my server, I will stick to the 8.04 as it is an LTS release. But I am thinking of installing the latest Ubuntu desktops onto my workstations in the next couple of weeks…
Update 1 8:00 PM
I have just installed Ubuntu 9.04 using the ISO image I downloaded earlier onto a VM. The installation was made even easier (the time zone is now selected by default). The default installation took just about five minutes. The boot time is also very impressive. It took just about 20 seconds before showing the login screen, which is a big improvement over my 8.04 installation.
Update 2 9:00 PM
Even though a fresh installation might be ideal, I decided to run the update on my Ubuntu 8.10 machine anyway. This is mainly because it was used as a file and VM server and I had done very little customizations on it besides that. So I think the chances of getting a successful upgrade is pretty high. The distribution upgrade is pretty slow though, and it is downloading at about 30k/s right now…
Update 3 4/24/2009 7:00 AM
The 8.10 to 9.04 upgrade went surprisingly well. The only problem I had has nothing to do with Ubuntu.
Since the machine I was doing the update on is a file and VMs server, I did not bother attach display or keyboard to it. So when I was doing the update yesterday used an SSH connection and forgot that the updates would need to shutdown SSH and other services in order to install the newer version of the daemons. Anyway, half way through the upgrade, the connection to my server was lost. At first I thought that I could just attach a monitor and keyboard to my server and continue the whole upgrade process. Of course it wouldn’t work since the upgrade process was tied to that particular terminal.
So I had to reboot the machine. For whatever reason, maybe because the machine was only half upgraded, the normal boot does not work and I could not log in via the graphical login screen. I restarted in “safe” mode dropping into a root shell and did a
sudo dpkg –configure -a
And the upgrade process picked up from where it was left at before. This is truly impressive! After the upgrade process finished, I rebooted into the new 9.04 installation:
sudo lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04
Codename: jaunty
The only thing that did not work after the upgrade was the VMWare Server (which is totally expected as it needs to link to the correct version of libraries). But after a simple re-config, the VMWare Server came back into life.
